Springboard to an academic career—A national medical student research program

Over the last decades there has been a decline in the recruitment of medical students into academia in all medical fields. Concurrently, medical research has increasingly included other disciplines in multidisciplinary convergence, introducing an unmet recruitment gap and requirement for medical researchers. To counteract the trend and recruit students to academic medicine, a national intercalated Medical Student Research Program (MSRP) was established in Norway in 2002. A preliminary evaluation in 2009 suggested that the MSRP had resulted in recruitment, but could not conclude on a lasting effect beyond graduation in a study that did not include any controls. These results led us to hypothesize that the MSRP could increase the number of PhD degrees and attract medical students towards academic medicine. Adopting a case cohort design, we here report that the intercalated MSRP had a significant impact of the throughput of physician-scientists to PhD, by increasing the rate of PhD completion 10-fold (p<0.001). Moreover, almost twice as many MSRP physicians reported an academic aspiration (49% vs 22%, p<0.001). Results suggested that an MSRP-like approach could efficiently address the unmet recruitment gap and strengthen the medical disciplines in medical research.

近数十年来，全球各医学领域招募医学生进入学术科研领域的人数均呈下降趋势。与此同时，医学研究愈发呈现多学科交叉融合的趋势，由此催生了尚未得到满足的人才招募缺口，对医学研究人员的需求也随之增加。为扭转这一趋势并吸引医学生投身学术医学事业，挪威于2002年设立了国家级嵌入式医学生研究项目（intercalated Medical Student Research Program, MSRP）。2009年的一项初步评估显示，该项目确实推动了医学生的招募工作，但由于该研究未设置对照组，无法证实其在学生毕业后仍具备长期效应。上述研究结果促使我们提出假设：MSRP可增加哲学博士（PhD）学位的授予数量，并吸引更多医学生投身学术医学领域。本研究采用病例队列研究设计，结果显示，嵌入式MSRP使医师科学家获得PhD学位的毕业率提升10倍（p<0.001），对其博士毕业进程产生了显著影响。此外，自称拥有学术职业志向的MSRP参与者占比几乎为对照组的两倍（49% vs 22%，p<0.001）。本研究结果表明，类似MSRP的项目可有效填补当前未被满足的人才招募缺口，强化医学研究领域的学科实力。