Who Chooses Medicine in Kosovo? New Survey Reveals Family Ties and High Satisfaction

Why do people decide to become doctors, and once they get there, are they glad they did? In many countries, those questions sit at the heart of health workforce planning, because a medical system is only as strong as the professionals willing to stay in it. A new cross-sectional study from Kosovo, published in BMC Health Services Research, offers one of the first systematic looks at how medical career decisions are made in the young Balkan state and how satisfied its medical students, physicians and dentists feel about the path they have chosen. The findings paint a picture of a profession built on a delicate balance between personal autonomy and family expectation, with satisfaction levels that are generally high but subtly shaped by career stage and gender.

The research team, led by Emire Çitaku of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and Ekrem Çitaku of the University Clinical Dental Center of Kosovo and Iliria College in Prishtina, set out to fill a conspicuous gap. Although the determinants of medical career choice have been studied extensively in Western Europe and North America, empirical evidence from Kosovo has remained limited. That gap matters for a practical reason: health workforce planners cannot design effective recruitment and retention strategies without knowing what draws people into medicine in the first place and what keeps them committed once they are in practice. The study was conceived explicitly as an exploratory contribution to that planning conversation.

Methodologically, the investigation took the form of a cross-sectional survey conducted between January and June 2019. The researchers recruited 300 participants drawn from three groups that together span the arc of a medical career: current medical students, practicing physicians and dentists. Recruitment used a convenience sampling approach, meaning participants were selected based on accessibility rather than random selection from the full population, a design choice the authors frame as appropriate for an exploratory study but one that warrants caution when generalizing to all Kosovar health professionals. Data were collected with a structured, anonymous paper-based questionnaire administered in Albanian, a format designed to encourage candid responses on a topic as personal as career motivation.

On the analytical side, the team processed the responses using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25. Descriptive statistics, including frequencies and percentages, were used to map the overall distribution of answers, while chi-square tests of independence were applied to probe whether particular variables, such as gender or career stage, were statistically associated with specific attitudes. The significance threshold was set at p less than 0.05, the conventional benchmark in health services research for treating an observed association as unlikely to be a product of chance alone. The study received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of Iliria College in Prishtina, with informed consent obtained through voluntary participation in the anonymous survey, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline result concerns who actually makes the decision to pursue medicine. Nearly half of the participants, 49.0 percent, reported that they chose their medical career independently, while 39.0 percent indicated that their parents influenced the decision. In other words, in Kosovo’s medical community, self-determination is the single most common mode of career choice, but family influence remains a powerful secondary force touching a substantial minority of professionals. This duality is striking because it captures, in a single dataset, the tension between the individualistic narrative of the self-made doctor and the collectivist family dynamics that characterize much of Balkan society, where parental expectations about prestigious, stable professions continue to carry real weight.

Satisfaction with the chosen profession emerged as another central finding. Overall, 71.3 percent of respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied with their career choice, a figure that suggests the profession retains a strong core of contentment despite the pressures that come with medical work in a health system still consolidating after decades of political and economic upheaval. Perhaps more intriguing was the comparison across career stages: students demonstrated a slightly higher proportion of being very satisfied compared to practicing professionals. That gradient, small as it is, will be familiar to workforce researchers elsewhere, since the transition from the idealism of medical school to the daily realities of clinical practice, administrative burden and resource constraints tends to erode enthusiasm. The Kosovo data suggest the same pattern may be operating there, though the exploratory design means the authors stop short of causal claims.

Commitment to the profession appears robust. A clear majority of participants, 80.7 percent, indicated that they would not change their profession if given the choice again. That figure is a meaningful signal for retention, because intention to stay is one of the strongest practical predictors of actual workforce stability. Yet the survey also uncovered gendered fault lines that complicate the rosy aggregate picture. The researchers observed a statistically significant association between gender and intention to change profession, with p equal to 0.023, and between gender and willingness to recommend the profession to others, with p equal to 0.007. While the abstract does not detail the direction of these differences, the mere existence of significant gender effects is consequential: it suggests that male and female medical professionals in Kosovo may experience the profession differently, a pattern often linked in international literature to disparities in career progression, work-life balance and workplace support.

For health workforce planners, the implications the authors draw are concrete. They argue that medical career choice in Kosovo reflects a balance between individual autonomy and family influence, and that the generally high satisfaction levels are encouraging, but the differences observed across career stages should inform discussions on workforce support strategies. Their recommendations center on integrating career guidance, mentoring and retention-focused interventions into health workforce planning. In practice, that could mean structured mentoring programs that connect students with practicing clinicians, career counseling that helps young people make informed and self-directed choices, and targeted support for practicing professionals whose satisfaction has dipped relative to their student counterparts. The gender-related associations add a further layer, implying that retention policies may need to be tailored rather than one-size-fits-all if they are to keep both men and women committed to clinical careers.

The study’s limitations deserve honest acknowledgment, and the authors themselves frame the work as exploratory. The convenience sample of 300 participants, while substantial for a small health system, cannot guarantee representativeness of all Kosovar medical professionals. The cross-sectional design captures a snapshot in time, here from 2019, and cannot establish whether the family influence observed at career entry persists or fades over a professional lifetime, nor whether the satisfaction gap between students and practitioners widens with age. Self-reported satisfaction is also inherently subjective and may be shaped by social desirability, particularly in a cultural context where expressing doubt about a prestigious career choice may carry stigma. The data were collected within a Master’s research project under institutional academic oversight, with the 2026 ethics approval covering secondary analysis and publication of the previously collected anonymized data.

Even with those caveats, the research fills a genuine void. Kosovo’s health system faces the same pressures confronting much of the region: emigration of skilled professionals, aging clinical workforces and limited fiscal capacity for retention incentives. Evidence about what motivates people to enter medicine and what keeps them satisfied is a prerequisite for evidence-based workforce policy, and until now, Kosovo has lacked it. By quantifying the split between independent and parental decision-making, documenting that roughly seven in ten professionals are content with their choice and that more than eight in ten would not change professions, and flagging significant gender differences in commitment, the study gives planners a starting baseline. Whether mentoring schemes and career guidance can convert that baseline into long-term workforce sustainability is now the question that policymakers in Prishtina, and researchers watching from abroad, will be asking next.

Subject of Research: Determinants of medical career choice and professional satisfaction among medical students, physicians and dentists in Kosovo

Article Title: Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning

Article References: Çitaku, E., Çitaku, E., Mrasori, S., & Krasniqi, B. (2026). Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Keywords: medical career choice, job satisfaction, health workforce planning, Kosovo, medical education, parental influence, retention, career guidance, mentoring, cross-sectional study, gender differences, physicians