specialty preferences and influencing factors among guilan medical sciences students

Background :reluctance to enter many specialized fields has occurred in guilan, iran, and this issue serves as a serious warning to health policymakers. objectives :the present study aims to investigate the level of interest in residency courses and the choice of future specialization among medical students in guilan university of medical sciences (gums). methods :medical students in their final two years of study were consecutively included in this cross-sectional study, from april to september 2023. the questionnaire was completed through direct interviews. a multinomial logistic regression model was applied to predict factors significantly affecting students' preferences. results :a total of 213 medical students with a mean age of 25.43 ± 1.66 years participated. among them, 55.9% were female, 14.1% were married, and 123 (57.7%) had plans to immigrate. regarding fields of residency, dermatology was ranked highest by 50 (23.5%), followed by radiology with 25 (11.7%), cardiology with 48 (22%), ophthalmology and orthopedics with 36 (17%), and pathology with 16 (7%) as their top five choices. conversely, orthopedics was the least preferred specialty with 57 (26.8%) students not choosing it, followed by infectious disease with 25 (11.7%), internal medicine with 21 (9.9%), emergency medicine with 8 (3.7%), and obstetrics and gynecology with 16 (7.5%). gender, hard work, income, work-life balance, on-call status, and duration of residency were found to be significant in univariate analysis and included in the model (p < 0.001). an individual's gender was the only variable that significantly affected preferences (p = 0.001) and non-preferences (p < 0.001) for specialized fields. conclusions :the study indicated that almost half of individuals were not interested in further education and desired to emigrate. the fact that income emerged as the only predictor for certain fields, along with some high-demand fields being among the least preferred specialties, highlights the importance of efforts to address this issue.