The medical student of today !

The modern student, we gather, is bored by the lectures he has to attend, and a genuine interest in his work, or a real scientific curiosity, is rare. Nevertheless, having the fear of the examiner before his eyes, he reads hard, but the whole system of examinations is "soul-killing, destroying originality, destroying continuity, and bestowing the prize on the man who patiently `swots' up his subjects and mechanically gives forth the answers he has been told to give." That lectures often cause boredom is true enough, but that is not altogether the fault of the student. That the passing of examinations is to a considerable extent a mechanical art cannot be denied, but that is mainly the fault not of the system, but of the way in which it is too often applied. As long as mere book knowledge is accepted as a passport by those who guard the portals of medicine, so long will cramming continue.


What the above excerpt describes is surprisingly familiar, don't you find ? And what is even more surprising is its origin : BMJ 1905;ii:971 !!!

Could it be that today's medical education in Malta is not all that different from what medical education was in the UK more than a century ago ?

Answers on a postcard or, rather, a blog comment !

Good news, at last ?

Hello and welcome to another very late update of my blog... But I'm sure you will excuse the delay, because I have some very fresh and very important news. So important that I've broken my self-imposed computer use ban to post them... Read on !

A few days ago, I heard something on the grapevine about an imminent visit to our university by people from St.George's... Great, I thought to myself, after RCSI there's now yet another bloody medical school franchise that wants to strip UoM Medical School of its good lecturers and take over Mater Dei...

So I started asking around, to see what's going on (..again !).

One of the people I talked to was kind enough to show me a document circulated to all medical staff and signed by our dean. What this document said is that the UoM Medical School and the SGUL Medical School are looking into the possibility of setting up a four-year graduate-entry medical course together.

I don't remember the exact text, but it was pointed out that the partnership would be equal and that the new four-year programme will run in harmony with the existing UoM five-year programme. So the whole thing is not a franchise, and the UoM would actually be gaining financially from it ! Sounds better than the RCSI proposal to me...

All I want to know now is what they are planning to do to avoid congestion at Mater Dei, and how much time our consultants will have to devote to the four-year course. If they solve those two issues, then the news of this partnership are very good news indeed.

If anybody knows more, please share your information ! I'll keep asking around and will let you know what I find out...