Improving the recruitment and retention of doctors by training medical students locally

The global shortage of doctors is of concern. This is particularly true in French-speaking regions of New Brunswick, Canada, where there is no medical school. Since 1981, francophone medical students from New Brunswick have been able to undertake part of their training in their province through an agreement with medical schools in another province. We studied the effects of frequency and length of exposure to the province of origin during medical training on the likelihood that a doctor will ever or currently practise medicine in that province. Editor in Chief Kevin Eva, speaks to Professor Michele Landry (Dieppe Family Medicine Unit, Vitalité Health Network, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada) about the paper that he co-authored in the November issue of Medical Education: 'Improving the recruitment and retention of doctors by training medical students locally' by Michel Landry, Aurel Schofield, Rachel Bordage, Mathieu Bélanger. Read the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.04055.x/abstract