Career-Choice Regret Among Medical Students in the United Kingdom: An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study of Occupational and Organizational Perceptions

Background: Career-choice regret has been reported among medical students internationally, but less is known about how career-choice responses coexist with perceptions of medicine as a profession and the National Health Service (NHS) as a potential employer among United Kingdom (UK) medical students.This study explored career-choice responses and occupational and organizational perceptions among UK medical students.Methods: An exploratory cross-sectional mixed-methods online survey was completed by 31 medical students from 22 UK universities who were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling.The primary outcome was participants' response to whether they would choose medicine again.Occupational and organizational perceptions were assessed using two newly developed, unvalidated 10-item composite perception measures.Participants also rated the importance of and expected satisfaction with career characteristics.Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively, and free-text responses from 18 participants were analyzed thematically.Results: Of 31 participants, 14 (45.2%) reported that they would choose medicine again, 10 (32.3%) were unsure, and 7 (22.6%) reported that they would not.Mean occupational and organizational composite scores were 25.23 (SD 6.34) and 38.97 (SD 8.20), respectively.Item-level responses suggested positive views of medicine as a profession alongside negative perceptions of several aspects of NHS employment.The largest gaps were between the importance attached to career characteristics and expected satisfaction related to work location, access to specialty training, work-life balance, and the work environment.Twenty-seven participants (87.1%) considered regret and dissatisfaction among medical students to be a common problem.Free-text responses highlighted concerns about medical education and postgraduate training, work-life balance, future career prospects, financial and working conditions, and feeling undervalued by the NHS.Other responses conveyed continued enthusiasm for medicine despite concerns about the organizational context.Conclusions: In this small, self-selected sample, positive perceptions of medicine as a profession coexisted with negative perceptions of the NHS as an organization, while fewer than half of participants reported that they would choose medicine again.These exploratory findings describe career-choice responses and occupational and organizational perceptions but do not establish a causal relationship between organizational dissatisfaction and stated willingness to choose medicine again or predict future career decisions.Larger studies using more diverse samples, validated measures, and longitudinal follow-up are needed to investigate how these perceptions relate to career choices over time.