Medical students have similar asks to their senior colleagues: to have adequate time and resources to look after patients in the way they deserve […]
Harrison Carter: Asking medical students to volunteer in A&E paints a woeful picture of the NHS
Category: Students
Neel Sharma and Kemparaju Hari Bhaskar: Complex presentations—surely it’s time for complex training?
Students need to be trained and assessed in a way that prepares them for working with patients who increasingly have multiple pathologies and comorbidities […]
Abraar Karan: Has medical education done a disservice to new physicians?
With thousands of newly minted physicians around the United States and internationally about to start their medical internships, teaching hospitals, residents, and attending physicians are gearing up for what has been known to be the rocky month of July. The “July Effect,” a phenomenon in which the mortality risk of patients and the number of […]
Daniel Sokol: Should doctors be saints?
Lavinia Woodward, 24, is a medical student at Oxford University. She is an aspiring heart surgeon with an excellent academic record. On 30 September 2016, under the influence of drink and drugs, she stabbed her boyfriend in the leg with a breadknife and inflicted cuts on his fingers. He sustained a 1cm leg wound and lacerations […]
Harrison Carter: Medical students’ perspectives on delivering frontline care are unique
Medical students rotate through clinical placements in their final three years of study. The timetables at medical schools are tailored to ensure that medical students experience different hospital environments, from large tertiary and regional referral centres to district general hospitals. In addition to different hospital environments, medical students rotate around different medical, surgical, and specialty […]
Richard Smith: What have I achieved in six years of teaching?
Yesterday as I flew home from teaching in Amsterdam for the last time, I wondered what I might have achieved in six (or perhaps it’s seven) years of teaching. Twice a year at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen) I have taught about non-communicable disease (NCD) on the “tropical doctors’ course,” […]
Neel Sharma: The first rule of diagnosis—eyes first and most, hands next and least
Medical education has changed dramatically in recent years. During my training we used a standard reference text and relied heavily on seniors to provide more detail about different clinical diseases. Nowadays, this kind of teaching seems less relevant. With online resources, learners are increasingly turning to the internet to access the latest guidelines on how […]
Eng-Tat Ang and Kapil Sugand: How can anatomy teaching be improved?
By their own admission, medical students tend to forget their anatomical knowledge when entering into clinical practice. It is common for surgical supervisors to question whether anatomy had ever been taught in an adequate and relevant manner, and they often find themselves having to revise the relevant topics with the students again. Anatomy professors have […]
Terence Stephenson: Medical licensing assessment will keep us ahead of the field
The GMC is consulting on plans to develop a medical licensing assessment (MLA) that will assure and showcase the quality of medical education and practice across the UK. The thinking behind a single objective assessment for those wishing to practise medicine in the UK stems from current piecemeal arrangements. These not only provide differing levels […]
Shilpa Prabhakar: Should you choose mental health as your specialty?
I have always wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps, like many, I was attracted to medicine because I wanted to help people. After qualifying in 2004, I briefly did a general medical rotation before moving into paediatrics and then surgical specialties. That’s when I came across psychiatry. Mental health is the only specialty where you can […]