Challenges facing early career academic cardiologists.

Early career academic cardiologists currently face unprecedented challenges that threaten a highly valued career path. A team consisting of early career professionals and senior leadership members of American College of Cardiology completed this white paper to inform the cardiovascular medicine profession regarding the plight of early career cardiologists and to suggest possible solutions. This paper includes: 1) definition of categories of early career academic cardiologists; 2) general challenges to all categories and specific challenges to each category; 3) obstacles as identified by a survey of current early career members of the American College of Cardiology; 4) major reasons for the failure of physician-scientists to receive funding from National Institute of Health/National Heart Lung and Blood Institute career development grants; 5) potential solutions; and 6) a call to action with specific recommendations.

Medical students' perceptions and attitudes about family practice: a qualitative research synthesis.

Background: During the last decade medical students from most Western countries have shown little interest in family practice. Understanding the factors that influence medical students to choose family medicine is crucial.

Objective: To systematically review and synthesize published evidence about medical students' attitudes and perceptions towards family practice.

Medical student attitudes towards family medicine in Spain: a statewide analysis.

Background: Family and community medicine (FM) became a recognized specialty in Spain in 1978; however, most medical schools in Spain still lack mandatory core courses in FM. In order to explore the perceptions, expectations and level of information amongst medical students in Spain in relation to FM and PC, and the training in these areas in the curriculum of the Medical Schools, a survey was developed to be administered in medical schools every two years. This article presents data from the first questionnaire administration.

Attitudes and perceptions of medical students about family medicine in Spain: protocol for a cross-sectional survey.

Background Despite the fact that family medicine (FM) has become established as a specialty in the past 25 years, this has not been reflected in the inclusion of the specialty in the majority of medical schools in Spain. Almost 40% of the students will work in primary care but, in spite of this, most universities do not have an assessed placement as such. There are only specific practice periods in health centres or some student-selected components with little weight in the overall curricula.

[Family Medicine and university in Spain: initial reflections from a national research project].

In 2006, a national research project was initially designed in Spain, with the basic aim of analysing the level of information on Primary Care that is available to medical students, their perception of the role of family medicine in the health system, and professional practice preferences, as well as the opinion expressed on the usefulness and need of specific teaching on primary care and family medicine during undergraduate studies. A questionnaire was prepared for each of the Spanish Faculties of Medicine to gather quantitative and qualitative data on the current situation on the teaching of primary care and family medicine. In this article, we give a short description of the characteristics of the project, the principle data obtained with this first questionnaire and, importantly, the first reflections on the academic situation of Family Medicine in Spain.