BMJ No. 7048 Volume 313 Saturday 6 July 1996
Abstract
Objectives - To estimate the prevalence of bullying in primary school children and to examine its association with common symptoms in childhood.
Design - Semistructured health interview conducted by school
nurses as part of a school medical. {abspara} Subjects - All children in year 4 of school during the
academic year 1992-93.
Main outcome measures - Reported bullying and common health
symptoms.
Results - 2962 children (93.1% of those on the school roll)
were interviewed (ages 7.6 to 10.0 years). Information about bullying was not
recorded for 114 children. 22.4% (95% confidence interval 20.9 to 24.0) of
children for whom information was available reported that they had been bullied.
There was an association between children reporting being bullied sometimes or
more often and reporting not sleeping well (odds ratio 3.6, 2.5 to 5.2), bed
wetting (1.7, 1.3 to 2.4), feeling sad (3.6, 1.9 to 6.8), and experiencing more
than occasional headaches (2.4, 1.8 to 3.4) and tummy aches (2.4, 1.8 to 3.3). A
significant trend for increasing risk of symptoms with increased frequency of
bullying was shown for all reported health symptoms (P\h0.001).
Conclusions - Health professionals seeing primary
schoolchildren who present with headaches, tummy ache, feeling sad or very sad,
bed wetting, and sleeping difficulties should consider bullying as a possible
contributory factor.
Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics,
Katrina Williams,
Department of Epidemiology,
Stuart Logan,
Newham Health Care,
Derek
Robinson,
Correspondence
to: Dr Logan.
Abstract
Objective - To report the career preferences of doctors who
qualified in the United Kingdom in 1993 and to compare their choices with those
of earlier cohorts of qualifiers.
Design - Postal
questionnaires with structured questions, including questions about choice of
future long term career, were sent to doctors a year after qualification.
Setting - United Kingdom. {abspara} Main outcome measures - Choice of future long term career and
certainty of choice expressed at the end of the first year after qualification.
Results - Questionnaires were sent to 3657 doctors. 2621
(71.7%) replied. Of the 2621 respondents, 70.5% (1849) stated that their first
preference was for a career in hospital practice, 25.8% (677) specified general
practice, 1.0% (25) specified public health medicine or community health, 1.4%
(36) specified careers outside medicine, and 1.3% (34) did not state a choice. By
contrast, 44.7% (1416/3168) of the doctors in the 1983 cohort had specified that
their first preference was general practice. Among the 1993 qualifiers, general
practice was the first career choice of 17.5% of men (227/1297) and 34.0% of
women (450/1324). Only 7.4% of men (96/1297) stated that they definitely wanted
to enter general practice. Only 7.8% (103/1324) of women qualifiers in 1993
expressed a career preference for surgical specialties. Within hospital practice,
comparing 1993 with 1983, choices for the medical specialties and for accident
and emergency medicine rose and those for pathology fell. Women were less
definite than men about their choice of future long term career.
Conclusions - If the 1993 cohort is typical of the current
generation of young doctors, there has been a substantial shift away from general
practice as a career choice expressed at the end of the preregistration year.
General practice was much more popular among women than men. Few women opted for
surgery. The sex imbalance in the percentage of doctors who choose different
mainstreams of medical practice seems set to continue.
Medical Careers Research Group,
St Bartholomew's and
Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry,
Queen Mary and Westfield College,
London E1 4NS
Mike Chambers,
Institute of Child
Health,
London WC1N 1EH
Beacontree House,
London E15 4EE
Career preferences of doctors who qualified in the United
Kingdom in 1993 compared with those of doctors qualifying in 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983
Trevor W Lambert, Michael J Goldacre, Carol Edwards, James Parkhouse
Unit of Health Care Epidemiology,
Department of Public Health and Primary Care,
University of Oxford,
Oxford OX3
7LF