Internship Experiences Affecting the Selection of OBGYN As a Career

Objective:

The primary objective was to explore the perceptions and insight of interns rotating in Obstetrics and gynaecology (OBGYN)department at Aga Khan University Karachi, about the appealing and distracting factors to choose it as a future career. The secondary objective was to recommend suggestions for enhancement of all the factors which attract the interns and improvement of aspects and issues, which distract them from taking OBGYN as career specialty.

 

 Design: 

The study design was Interpretive Phenomenology as it deals with live experience of humans rather than what they consciously know and goes beyond description of core concepts.

Method:

This is qualitative study conducted at Aga Khan University, Karachi, after approval from Ethical Review Committee. All the interns rotating between 1^st June 2021 till May 31^st 2022 in OBGYN department, who gave the consent, were interviewed at the end of their 3 months rotation. The 30 to 40 minutes, semi structured in depth interviews were conducted and audiotaped, by non-clinical faculty. Interviews were transcribed verbatim by two researchers. During analyses codes were generated to words and phrases that represent unit of data, linked with an idea. Content analysis was done by two researchers to identify themes that emerged from the data/codes and conclusions were derived.

 

Results:

The emerged themes were, purpose for selecting Obgyn in internship, motivating, demotivating factors and effect of this internship on decision of future career specialty.

 Results exhibited that, participants took this specialty in internship, because of female gender acceptance for this in Pakistani culture. They want to have some knowledge of subject being female. Some participants have some unexpected and unfortunate personal experiences in the family and want to have first-hand knowledge of the subject to prevent that in future. Stressful learning environment, poor work life balance and prolonged working hours are the main deterring factors. The variety of work (surgery and medicine, both in one specialty) and joy of helping a family in welcoming a new member was the motivational factor.

Conclusions: 

Selection of a specialty as a career involves multifaceted aspects, including innate motivations as well as external environmental influences. There is a need to work on factors that are discouraging interns from taking Obgyn as career and suggest solutions to enhance interest of medical professionals in this field.