The Effect of the Organization and Status of Family Practice Undergraduate Programs on Residency Selection

Family practice, as a medical specialty, is designed to help fill the void in primary care availability. In order to expose medical students to family practice and provide a basis for choosing a residency in the field, many medical schools have developed undergraduate programs in family practice. This paper reports the results of a survey conducted in March 1975 on the status of undergraduate programs with particular focus on the relationships between administrative status, size of program, faculty size, and type of undergraduate curricula to the number of graduates choosing family practice as a specialty. The data indicate that there is a relationship between the commitment of the school to family practice, the size of the program, and the presence of required courses in the curriculum to the success of the program, as measured by the proportion of students in each school who choose family practice residencies.