Background: Thailand is one of the developing countries encountering medical workforce shortage. From the national registry in 2006, there were 33 166 physicians: 41.5% worked in the government sector, 21.6% worked in the private sector, and the remaining worked in non-medical fields. There is no current data to confirm the effectiveness of the national policy to increase physician production. We demonstrate our findings from the strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis in medical students and the potential impact on national workforce planning. Methods: We introduced SWOT analysis to 568 medical students during the 2008–2010 academic years, with the objective of becoming “a good physician in the future”. Results: Pertinent issues were grouped into 4 categories: not wanting to be a doctor, having inadequate medical professional skills, not wanting to work in rural or community areas, and planning to pursue training in specialties with high salary/low workload/low risk for lawsuit. The percentages of medical students who described themselves as “do not want to be a doctor” and “do not want to work in rural or community areas” increased from 7.07% and 25.00% in 2008 to 12.56% and 29.65% in 2010, respectively. Conclusion: Further intervention should be considered in order to change the medical students’ attitudes on the profession and their impact on Thai health system.

PURPOSE: At present, transformative learning is one of the most important issues in medical education, since a conventional learning environment is prone to failure due to changing patterns among students. Ethnographic edutainment is a concept that consists of reward, competition, and motivation strategies that be used to effectively engage with learners. METHODS: A total 321 first-year medical students took part in ethnographic edutainment sessions in 2011. We defined four preset learning objectives and assigned a term group project using clouding technologies. Participatory evaluation was conducted to assess the delivery of and attitudes towards this method. RESULTS: Career lifestyles in the general population and expected real-life utilization of the final product were used as motivating factors, with competition and rewards provided through a short film contest. Nineteen out of twenty groups (95%) achieved all learning objectives. Females were more satisfied with this activity than males (P<0.001). We found statistically significant differences between lecture-based sessions and field visit sessions, as well as ethnographic edutainment activity sessions and other instructional approaches (P<0.01). The results were consistent in male and female groups. CONCLUSION: Ethnographic edutainment is well accepted, with higher satisfaction rates than other types of teaching. The concepts of health promotion and the social determinants of health can be learned through ethnographic edutainment activities, which might help train more humanized health professionals.
Education, Medical ; Female ; Health Occupations ; Health Promotion ; Humans ; Learning ; Life Style ; Male ; Motivation ; Personal Satisfaction ; Reward ; Social Determinants of Health ; Students, Medical* ; Thailand*