How to Fix British Undergrad Medical Education? Two suggestions: Copy the US, or use Google Wave.
So, is Google Wave going to fix medical education in this country? Quick answer: of course not. Silly question. Of course, the question is really there to draw you in and make you think. What am I really asking? Something like... "How can we use advanced forms of Social Media to improve the undergraduate medical education experience?"
But why fix? Is it broken? Well, not really broken, but there are issues. And what's this got to do with the US? Well, foremost of the problems I see with current medical undergrads is the lack of time spent on wards / clinical responsibility. When I was working at MUSC in the US, I worked with some excellent medical students who were knowledgeable, personable and interested. Even though I was only there for 3 months, and some of their attachments were even shorter than that, I got to know them well and saw them improve noticeably in that short period.
I even friended some of them on facebook.
Back home, I can't tell you the names of any of the medical students that have been attached to my firm in the last 3 years. Is this because my memory is terminally shoddy? On this occasion, no. Because recently I've not seen a student often enough to really get any idea who they were, what they knew, or what they needed to learn.
Particularly in district general hospitals, students seem to spend one or two half-day sessions on the ward, following the consultant ward round, occasionally getting a grilling, then disappearing off to some unspecified teaching. At first I thought they were all just going home (I distinctly remember using the phrase 'studying in the library' as a euphemism for going straight home, possibly via the pub (it didn't look like this when I was at med school though)) but they really do have timetables with various educational commitments, all over the hospital.
Great that they're being exposed to so much, but dismal that they spend most of the time as hospital tourists, superficially glancing over a variety of procedures, clinics, rounds and lectures then forgetting all about most of it.
How do we get students to make the most of their time in a hospital?
So option 1: Get them on the ward, get to know them, give them some responsibility (the US model). I like it. But with so much to see and learn, are we depriving them of the huge variety of experience they currently have access to?
Option 2: Use social media. Google Wave is the hot topic right now (and it does looke pretty freaking cool), since it mashes up the best of email, blogging, IM, and wikis/online documents. Is this how we'll get students to actually reflect on and synthesize their experiences?
Perhaps a single session in the cath lab, or at a falls clinic will become substantially more meaningful if medical students can discuss, reflect, share relevant resources, and contribute to some kind of assessable group output on each of the types of experience they've had in their hospital attachment? (Because with British medical students, if there's no assessed end product, several would probably say f**k it and go to the pub. I know I would have) This does raise the question of how you assess collaborative work, of course.
Or why not do both? A bit of the old-school with some of the new wave? Sounds like a good idea to me.
But why fix? Is it broken? Well, not really broken, but there are issues. And what's this got to do with the US? Well, foremost of the problems I see with current medical undergrads is the lack of time spent on wards / clinical responsibility. When I was working at MUSC in the US, I worked with some excellent medical students who were knowledgeable, personable and interested. Even though I was only there for 3 months, and some of their attachments were even shorter than that, I got to know them well and saw them improve noticeably in that short period.
I even friended some of them on facebook.
Back home, I can't tell you the names of any of the medical students that have been attached to my firm in the last 3 years. Is this because my memory is terminally shoddy? On this occasion, no. Because recently I've not seen a student often enough to really get any idea who they were, what they knew, or what they needed to learn.
Particularly in district general hospitals, students seem to spend one or two half-day sessions on the ward, following the consultant ward round, occasionally getting a grilling, then disappearing off to some unspecified teaching. At first I thought they were all just going home (I distinctly remember using the phrase 'studying in the library' as a euphemism for going straight home, possibly via the pub (it didn't look like this when I was at med school though)) but they really do have timetables with various educational commitments, all over the hospital.
Great that they're being exposed to so much, but dismal that they spend most of the time as hospital tourists, superficially glancing over a variety of procedures, clinics, rounds and lectures then forgetting all about most of it.
How do we get students to make the most of their time in a hospital?
So option 1: Get them on the ward, get to know them, give them some responsibility (the US model). I like it. But with so much to see and learn, are we depriving them of the huge variety of experience they currently have access to?
Option 2: Use social media. Google Wave is the hot topic right now (and it does looke pretty freaking cool), since it mashes up the best of email, blogging, IM, and wikis/online documents. Is this how we'll get students to actually reflect on and synthesize their experiences?
Perhaps a single session in the cath lab, or at a falls clinic will become substantially more meaningful if medical students can discuss, reflect, share relevant resources, and contribute to some kind of assessable group output on each of the types of experience they've had in their hospital attachment? (Because with British medical students, if there's no assessed end product, several would probably say f**k it and go to the pub. I know I would have) This does raise the question of how you assess collaborative work, of course.
Or why not do both? A bit of the old-school with some of the new wave? Sounds like a good idea to me.
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