Medical students’ rural interest stays strong

For another consecutive year, general practice is the second most preferred specialty among final year medical students, an annual survey has found.
 
An update to the Medical Schools Outcomes Database, conducted by Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand, indicates 15.6% of students in the last year of their medical degree in 2025 want their future to lie in general practice.
 
General practice alone accounted for 8.8% of students’ preferences, which included 2084 responses from an overall cohort of 3994.
 
When combined with 6.8% for rural generalism, which was recognised as a specialty within general practice last year, it puts final year students looking for a general practice career just behind the 16% listing adult medicine as their preferred choice.
 
Of the other specialties, anaesthesia and surgery remained popular at 14.3% and 13.5% respectively.
 
While interest in rural generalism dipped slightly from a 7.1% peak two years ago, RACGP Rural Chair Associate Professor Michael Clements believes the recent figures reflect a growing awareness.
 
‘I suspect part of the bump will be due to both national media and our own college’s media on rural generalism recognition – it’s a very visible pathway now,’ he told newsGP.  
 
He also notes a trend towards increasing rurality of students, which he believes reflects university investment into rural pathways, while those on longer rural placements are more likely to state an interest in practising outside of the big cities.
 
‘The data is showing that more and more, we’re seeing medical students tend to have come from a rural background,’ Associate Professor Clements said.
                                   
‘It just reinforces that when we recruit medical students from a rural area, when we give them positive rural experiences, when we’ve got a well-developed plan and a pathway for where they can work, that it is attractive.
 
‘It is exciting and we as a college have worked very hard to make our rural generalist program appealing, robust and flexible.’
 
The numbers are a slight fall from 2022 and 2023, when more students stated general practice and rural generalism as their preferred career path than any other specialty.
 
However, the preferences set out in the survey do not always reflect eventual choices, with general practice training recently attracting much higher numbers than students’ preferences would suggest.
 
Research published last year in the Medical Journal of Australia indicated 32.9% of the medical school graduates went into general practice and rural generalism training in 2025 – a trend Associate Professor Clements also points out.
 
‘This year, 2026, was the largest ever intake of GP registrars and next year all of the initial data is pointing to a very large increase in the number of people applying for general practice,’ he said.
 
‘The data is showing that medical students perhaps aren’t thinking about general practice as much as we’d like them to, but it also shows people do end up choosing general practice as one of the most popular specialties by headcount above all others.’
 
Among domestic students, who made up 87.9% of the respondents, interest in general practice is significantly higher (16.8%) compared to international students (7.1%).
 
Associate Professor Clements also points to a growing pipeline of international medical graduates, a majority of whom are going into general practice, which he says reflects a positive outlook for future GPs in terms of both recruitment and training.
 
For him, the discrepancy between survey results and eventual specialty choice indicates there is still scope to increase students’ exposure to general practice during their studies.
 
‘I don’t blame medical students who have experienced a medical degree where the majority of their training has been within university campuses or in hospitals, to get to the end of medical school and when they’re asked about general practice, not many of them are ticking the box,’ he said.
 
‘For some of them, the entirety of their general practice experience or rural experience is a mandatory four-to-eight-week term.
 
‘That data is just more reflective of the general practice experience among university students and there’s room for improvement in that space.’
 
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