Background and Aim: Targets of family medicine specialty education are the recognition and adoption of core disciplinary competencies and also the ensuring that graduates are ready for primary care. The aim of this study is to determine the attitudes of specialist family physicians to the new study period and their expectations from family medicine practice just before they go to the field. Thus, our study will provide feedback for the current family medicine practice and speciality training programme.

Methods: This is a descriptive, cross-sectional study. All (39+47) specialist family physicians who participated in the two-period (80-81) compulsory health service draw were informed about working by telephone. Those who accepted to participate were asked to fill out the questionnaire and send them via e-mail. The data were statistical analyzed with SPSS 16.0 program.

Results: Forty-nine participants were included in the study (57%) and 61.2% (n:30) were women; mean age was 32,0±4,7. Thirty-six (73.5%) participants were married and average working year was 6,7±4,4. Sixty-six percent of the physicians wanted to work in the private primary care centers. Sixteen (32.7%) of those stated that they wished to pursue an academic career if there has not been a compulsory health service. Eighty five point seven percent of participants did not want to provide emergency services in family health centers and 89.8% of those did not want to have any night-shift. Twenty-nine (59.2%) of them consider their specialty education as adequate for the units they will study and the number of those who were happy to be a family medicine specialist was 44 (89.8%).

Conclusions: The majority of family medicine specialists who have just completed their specialist training are pleased to be family medicine specialists; but only about one-fifth of them feel hopeful about the compulsory health service.