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Abstract
Medical student education is critical to developed and developing countries’ ability to maintain and extend health services. Loss of students from teaching courses is a significant opportunity cost and real cost, particularly affecting resource-poor settings. Recent influences adversely affecting medical student completions include student attrition due to economic costs to students and their families, longer duration of study with consequent delayed earning capacity of an individual, immediate social and financial stressors and university staffing instability. Some of these, including economic costs with consequent financial stress can be addressed with external financial and other support. The present article summarises several contributing factors to medical student attrition. It highlights emerging factors in the decade before COVID-19 on a global scale and provides insight into the individual and institutional factors that affect this decision. Understanding these factors in isolation is an important stepping stone for institutions to address them, and presenting them together provides awareness of their interconnected nature for further study. This review summarises current literature in this area from the decade before COVID-19, which demonstrate higher rates of attrition in many studies in women rather than men, in migrant rather than local students, and in students with a diagnosis of mental illness and from under-represented communities.
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Article Type: Review Article
ELECTR J MED ED TE, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2025, Article No: em2501
https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmets/15904
Publication date: 29 Jan 2025
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