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Students' expected practice locations and their tolerance of ambiguity.

No abstract available.

A comparison of the numbers of pharmaceutical advertising pages in family medicine research journals and journals in other medical disciplines.

PURPOSE: To determine whether declines in pharmaceutical industry advertising have been greater for family medicine research journals than for journals in other disciplines. METHOD: Three family medicine research journals and eight randomly selected journals in other disciplines were chosen for this study. The number of advertising pages from the first issue of each journal from 1990 through 1995 were calculated by manually counting every journal page that contained all or part of an advertisement for a pharmaceutical product. Data were compared using Students t-test. RESULTS: Overall, the mean number of pages of pharmaceutical advertising in all of the journals fell 41%, from 34 pages in 1990-1991 to 21 pages in 1994-1995. For the three family medicine journals the drop over the same six-year period was 55% (from 30 to 14, p = .01), compared with a 35% drop for the eight other journals (from 36 to 23, p < .001). CONCLUSION: Although advertising in medical research journals has dropped in all disciplines, it would appear that the decline for family medicine journals has been disproportionately large. The potential effect of this decline for the discipline of family medicine is a decrease in the outlets and opportunities for the publication of new knowledge.

Family Medicine Department Chairs' Opinions Regarding Scope of Practice.

Purpose Family physicians are trained broadly to provide the majority of health care across multiple settings; however, their scope of practice has narrowed. Department chairs’ role modeling of a broad scope of practice may set the tone for faculty and trainees. Method In 2013, the authors surveyed family medicine department chairs about their scope of practice, personal and department characteristics, and attitudes and beliefs about scope of practice and role modeling. They used descriptive statistics and bivariate analyses to test for associations between scope of practice, personal and department characteristics, and attitudes and beliefs. They created a Scope of Practice Index by summing the number of services each respondent provided to compare scope of practice across chairs. Results Of 146 chairs, 88 responded (60.3% response rate); 85 were included in the final analysis. Sixty-five (77.4%) respondents were male; 73 (86.9%) were 51 years or older. Respondents spent a mean of 19.7% of their time in direct patient care and had a mean Scope of Practice Index of 11.9. Fifty-three (62.4%) disagreed that the scope of practice of family medicine was too broad for practicing physicians to keep up in all areas, and 56 (65.9%) believed that faculty should role model the full scope of practice to learners. Responses generally did not vary by respondents’ personal scope of practice. Conclusions Family medicine department chairs believe that role modeling a broad scope of practice increases students’ interest in family medicine and encourages residency graduates to provide a wide range of services.