Attitudes of final year medical students towards work in rural areas could be a problem for Croatian tourism

In Croatia, as in many other countries, the problems of insufficient number and uneven distribution of physicians between urban and rural areas are significant. This is especially evident on the Croatian Adriatic coast and numerous islands. Aforementioned issues are not unique to Croatia and have been identified by the WHO as a worldwide problem.1 With that in mind, in June 2018, we conducted a cross-sectional survey by use of a modified questionnaire developed by Takeda et al on final year medical students of the University of Zagreb School of Medicine assessing their career choices and attitudes towards work in rural areas.2 In total, 280 of 302 medical students completed the survey (response rate 92.72%); female: 180/280 (64.29%) and male: 100/280 (35.71%). While most of our students, 240/280 (74.30%), expressed their interest to work as clinicians, majority of them, 109/248 (43.95%), would, if possible, avoid working in rural areas and 29/248 (11.69%) would never work in rural areas. On the other hand, 88/248 (35.48%) students would be willing to work in rural areas only for a certain period of time while 18/280 (7.26%) would be willing to work in a rural area permanently. There was no significant gender difference. In an earlier study by Polasek et al in 2006, a total of 140 out of 204 (68.6%) students expressed their preference for working in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, while only 39/204 students (19.1%) wanted to work outside of Zagreb, which involves both larger cities, rural areas and everything in-between.3 Therefore, it appears some progress has been made since 2006, if almost 43% of our medical students are now willing to consider spending at least some time working in a rural area as a physician.