Selection of right medical students to combat rural shortage of doctors: could it be a solution? In perspective of Bangladesh

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. This comparative cross-sectional study was conducted to find the association between duration of service in rural health facilities and physicians' background factors to redress geographic imbalances in physician distribution. Among 6898 participants, information of 989 were retrieved from Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), Minsitry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW), Bangladesh, through systematic sampling. Physicians who worked in rural health facilities for less than 3 years were labelled as group A, and those worked 3 years or more in rural places were put in group B. Background factors of two groups were compared and proportion of doctors living and working in rural areas was sorted. Among the participants, eighty percent were working in urban facilities and 50% worked in rural areas for less than three years. Proportion of females was about 30% and there was no significant differences between male and female in terms of duration of stay in rural areas in both groups (p=0.07). The association between place of completion of secondary school certificate (SSC) examination and duration of services in the rural areas were found statistically significant (p=0.003). Apart from this, no other background factors were found to be significantly associated.