Survey of Medical Students
Final year medical students were surveyed at fourteen medical schools. The purpose of the survey was to assess students' preferences over hypothetical assignments differing in locational amenities, compensation packages, and career paths. The data file for the student stated-preference survey is in ASCII form. The first line has variable names. Variables are separated by commas, missing values are indicated by a period . There are 10530 observations, representing 18 choice tasks per respondent for 585 respondents. Respondent characteristics are repeated for each of the 18 observations.
Survey of Serving Doctors
The mail-out survey of serving doctors was designed to complement the survey of graduating medical students. Contract doctors (recent graduates performing compulsory service) were surveyed at health centers nationwide, excluding urban areas, and very remote areas.The purpose of the mail-out survey was to determine the conditions under which serving doctors would be willing to extend their contracts. At the time of the survey, such extensions were not allowed. It was hypothesized that – at least for a subset of doctors – modest additional incentives might elicit a substantial increase in willingness to extend. The preferences of pre-service medical students are based on very fragmentary information, and these preferences may well change as a result of field experience. The data for the survey of serving doctors is in .dbf format, and can be read with a spreadsheet (such as excel). The file is nearly 6 megabytes, and so facilitate downloading, it is available here in .zip format (needs to be "unzipped" before using).
The Problem: Providing health personnel to rural and remote areas
Health problems are often the most acute in rural and remote areas, especially in developing countries. But it is difficult to get health professionals to serve in these areas. Understandably, most physicians prefer to settle in urban areas offering opportunities for professional development, education and other amenities for their families, and attractive employment opportunities. As a result, there is a mismatch between the geographic distribution of physicians and the perceived need for them.