One of the worries about medical students is that they are not well connected to the real world. The come mostly from privileged backgrounds, enter the monastery of the medical school at 18, and spend the next 10 years focusing on passing exams and learning basic clinical skills. It’s not surprising that many come to feel uncomfortable in the messy, even ugly world of the NHS, cogs in a dysfunctional machine. Well, I’ve seen the answer.

And the beauty of the answer is that while doing great things for the medical students it does even better things for a very deprived group—asylum seekers and refugees. Many students and recent graduates from St George’s, University of London, and some students from other universities in the area, work with asylum seekers and refugees through the Klevis Kola Foundation. more…

“See one, do one, teach one?”

Gone are the days when medical students did what they were told, learnt what was on the syllabus, and spoke when spoken to.

“See one, do one, teach one?” Not a chance.

Instead, they conscientiously object. more…

I’ve recently read with great interest the “for” and “against” debate in BMJ Careers on whether doctors should have a guaranteed job upon qualifying from medical school. It sounds reasonable that medical schools train the number of future doctors that is adequate to the needs of the population and that replaces the doctors that retire every year. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me anymore that medical graduates have jobs waiting for them if medical schools churn out more doctors than those that are needed. In the future, the situation may become even more complex due to the growing globalization of the medical profession, which makes it very difficult to plan human resources at a national level. We can’t assume anymore that doctors trained in a certain country remain in that country (I am not including here countries with already high levels of medical brain drain, particularly in the developing world). more…

One of the top five reasons given by medical students for not regularly attending meetings is “discouraged to attend by department and university,” a survey by the American Association of the History of Medicine, an academic society devoted to the history of medicine and all aspects of health, has found. This finding resonates with me because my attempts to seek authorised leave of absence to attend the British Neuroscience Association national meeting to present a poster were met with initial resistance from senior lecturers and clinicians. I was told that I would risk failing the “professional behaviour” domain of the module because of unacceptable attendance, despite me saying that I would do extra clinical work in the holidays to make up for time lost. more…

The procedures of admissions to medical school are extremely varied around the world. Yet they seem to have one thing in common – success is considered a huge deal. At the next family reunion, you are bound to have enchanted relatives patting you on the back, dropping comments about how you make them proud. Are such complements now slightly premature however? What made you stand out amongst the many applicants, allowing you to fish a letter of acceptance out of your mailbox? more…

Recently I met a student who had been in a Problem Based Learning (PBL) group that I had ‘facilitated’ in 2006. During the PBL we will have spent around six hours together each week for a full trimester (so around 72 hours contact time in all) and I was interested to know if he could remember learning anything specific from his time in the group. Not surprisingly he could not recollect any specific facts but there was a much broader issue, that of tackling conflicting advice, which did come to mind. more…

The recent research study published in the BMJ entitled “Ethnic stereotypes and the underachievement of UK medical students from ethnic minorities: qualitative study” discussed the underperformance of (presumably South) Asian medical students. It suggested that stereotypes of Asian students may damage their relationships with clinical teachers, resulting in their relatively poor performance in exams.

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