Changing your mind — and how to avoid

The economist J.K. Galbraith once suggested that when people are “faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof”

The market is dead: long live the market | Wonkhe | Comment

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That was yesterday

GlaxoSmithKline is to reintroduce performance-based bonuses linked to the number of prescriptions written for its medicines, reversing a company ban on the practice following a bribery scandal in the US….

The company was fined $3bn in 2012 after it admitted bribing doctors to write extra prescriptions for some products. As part of the settlement with US authorities, the drugmaker agreed it would no longer pay reps according to the number of prescriptions generated. That agreement has since lapsed.

GlaxoSmithKline revamps incentives for sales representatives | Financial Times

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Late night thoughts on medical education #8: Where to draw the line?

In the previous post, I talked about some of the details of how undergraduate clinical teaching is organised. It is not an apprenticeship, but rather an alienating series of short attachments characterised by a lack of continuity of teacher-pupil contact. This is not something easily fixed because the structure is geared around the needs of the NHS staff who deliver the bulk of student teaching, rather than what we know makes sense pedagogically. I likened it to the need to put up with getting through security when you travel by plane: you want to get somewhere, but just have to grin and bear the humiliation. This is not a university education. I am not saying that individual teachers are to blame — far from it — as many enjoy teaching students. It is a system problem.

The interdependence of undergraduate education and postgraduate medical training

It is not possible to make sense of either undergraduate medical education or postgraduate training without looking at the forces that act on the other. It is also far too easy to assume that ‘the system’ in the UK is the only way to organise things, or indeed, to think it is anywhere near optimal. A damning critique of medicine (and much else in society) in the UK is our inability to learn from what others do.

The formative influences on (undergraduate) medical education are those conditions that were operating over half a century ago. At that time, a medical degree qualified you to enter clinical practice with — for many students — no further formal study. And much clinical practice was in a group size of n=1.

In the 1950s the house year (usually 6 months surgery and 6 months medicine) was introduced. Theoretically this was under the supervision of the university, but in practice this supervision was poor, and the reality was that this was never going to work in the ‘modern NHS’. How can the University of Edinburgh supervise its graduates who work at the other end of the country? In any case, as has been remarked on many occasions, although the rationale for the house year was ‘education’, the NHS has never taken this seriously. Instead, housepersons became general dogsbodies, working under conditions that could have come from a Dickens novel. In my own health board, the link between master and pupil has been entirely broken: apprenticeship is not only absent from the undergraduate course, but has been exiled from a lot of postgraduate training (sic). House doctors are referred to as ‘ward resources’, not tied to any group of supervising doctors. Like toilet cisterns, or worse…

Nonetheless, the changes in the 1950 and other reforms in the 1960s established the conventional wisdom that the aim of undergraduate medical education was not to produce a ‘final product’ fit to travel the world with their duffel-shaped leather satchel in hand. Rather, there would be a period of postgraduate training leading to specialist certification.

Training versus education

This change should have been momentous. The goal was to refashion the undergraduate component; and allow the postgraduate period to produce the finished product (either in a specialty, or in what was once called general practice). It is worth emphasising what this should have meant.

From the point of view of the public, the key time for certification for medial practice was not graduation, but being placed on the specialist register. The ability to practice independently was something granted to those with higher medical qualification (MRCP, MRCPysch etc) and who were appointed to a consultant post. All other posts were training posts, and practice within such roles was not independent but under supervision. Within an apprenticeship system — which higher professional training largely should be — supervision comes with lots of constraints, constraints that are implicit in the relation between master and pupil, and which have stayed largely unchanged across many guilds and crafts for near on a thousand years.

What went wrong was no surprise. The hospitals needed a cadre of generic dogbodies to staff them given the 24 hour working conditions necessary in health care. Rather than new graduates choosing their final career destination (to keep with my airport metaphor) they were consigned to a holding pattern for 2-7 years of their life. In this service mode, the main function was ‘service’ not supervised training. As one of my former tutees in Edinburgh correctly told me at graduation: (of course!)he was returning to Singapore, because if he stayed in the NHS he would just be exploited until he could start higher professional training. The UK remains an outlier worldwide in this pattern of enforced servitude[1].

What has all this to do with undergraduate education?

The driving force in virtually all decision making with the UK health systems is getting through to the year-end. The systems live hand-to-mouth. They share a subsistence culture, in which it almost appears that their primary role is not to deliver health care, but to reflect an ideology that might prove attractive to voters. As with much UK capitalism, the long term always loses out to the short term. What happened after the realisation that a graduating medical students was neither beast nor fowl, was predictable.

The pressure to produce generic trainees with little meaningful supervision in their day-to-day job, meant that more and more of undergraduate education was sacrificed to the goal of producing ‘safe and competent’ FY (foundation years 1 & 2) doctors, doctors who again work as dogsbodies and cannot learn within a genuine apprenticeship model. The mantra became that you needed five years at medical school, to adopt a transitory role, that you would willingly escape from as soon as possible. Furthermore the undergraduate course was a sitting duck for any failings of the NHS: students should know more about eating disorders, resilience, primary care, terminal care, obesity, drug use… the list is infinite, and the students sitting ducks, and the medical schools politically ineffective.

What we now see is an undergraduate degree effectively trying to emulate a hospital (as learning outside an inpatient setting is rare). The problem is simply stated: it is not possible to do this within a university that does not — and I apologise if I sound like an unreconstructed Marxist — control the means of production. Nor is it sensible to try and meld the whole of a university education in order to produce doctors suitable for a particular time-limited period of medical practice, that all will gladly leave within a few years of vassalage.

 Medical exceptionalism

Medicine is an old profession, (I will pass on GBS’ comments about the oldest profession). In medicine the traditional status of both ‘profession’ and ‘this profession’ in particular has been used to imagine that medicine can stand aloof from other changes in society. There are three points I want to make on this issue: two are germane to my argument, whilst the other, I will return to in another post.

The first is that in the immediate post-Flexner period to the changes in medical education in the 1950s and 1960s, few people in the UK went to university. Doctors did go to university even if the course was deemed heavily vocational, with a guaranteed job at the end of it. Learning lots of senseless anatomy may not have compared well with a liberal arts eduction but there was time for maturing, and exposure to the culture of higher learning. Grand phrases indeed, but many of us have been spoiled by their ubiquity. Our current medical students are bright and mostly capable of hard work, but many lack the breadth and ability to think abstractly of the better students in some other faculties. (It would for instance, be interesting to look at secular changes in degree awards of medical students who have intercalated.) No doubt, medical students are still sought after by non-medical employers, but I suspect this is a highly self-selected group and, in any case, reflects intrinsic abilities and characteristics as much as what the university has provided them with.

The second point, is that all the professions are undergoing change. The specialist roles that were formalised and developed in the 19th century, are under attack from the forces that Max Weber identified a century ago. The ‘terminally differentiated’ individual is treated less kindly in the modern corporate state. Anybody who has practiced medicine in the last half century is aware of the increasing industrialisation of medical practice, in which the battle between professional judgment and the impersonal corporate bureaucracy is being won by the latter [2][3]

My third point is more positive. Although there have been lots of different models of ‘professional training’ the most prevalent today is a degree in a relevant domain (which can be interpreted widely) following by selection for on the job training. Not all those who do a particular degree go onto the same career, and nor have the employers expected the university to make their graduates ‘fit for practice’ on day 1 of their employment. Medicine has shunned this approach, still pretending that universities can deliver apprenticeship training, whilst the GMC and hospitals have assumed that you can deliver a safe level of care by offloading core training that has to be learned in the workplace, to others. No professional services firm that relies on return custom and is subject to the market would behave in this cavalier way. Patients should not be so trusting.

In the next post, I will expand on how — what was said of Newton — we should cleave nature at the joints in order to reorganise medical education (and training).

[1] Re; the enforced servitude. I am not saying this work is not necessary, nor that those within a discipline do not need to know what goes on on the shop floor. But to put it bluntly, the budding dermatologist should not be wasting time admitting patients with IHD or COPD, or inserting central lines or doing lumbar punctures. Nor do I think you can ethically defend a ‘learning curve’ on patients given that the learner has committed not to pursue a career using that procedure. The solution is obvious, and has been discussed for over half a century: most health care workers need not be medically qualified.

[2] Which of course raises the issue of whether certification at an individual rather than an organisational level makes sense. In the UK the government pressure will be to emphasise the former at the expense of the latter: as they say, the beatings will continue until moral improves.

[3] Rewards in modern corporations like the NHS or many universities are directed at generic management skills, not domain expertise. University vice-chancellors get paid more than Nobel prize winners at the LMB. In the NHS there is a real misalignment of rewards for those clinicians who their peers recognise as outstanding, versus those who are medical managers (sic). If we think of some of the traditional crafts — say painting or sculpture – I doubt we can match the technical mastery expertise of Florence. Leonardo would no doubt now by handling Excel spreadsheets as a manager (see this piece on Brian Randell’s homepage on this very topic).

Quite a motto to live by, but David Hume saw things more clearly than the rest of us.

Hume’s ironic wit and humour make him a biographer’s dream. After his History of England proved to be a tremendous critical and popular success, his publisher entreated him for another volume, only to receive the memorable rebuff:

 

“I have four reasons for not writing: I am too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich.”

 

When at a last dinner before Hume’s death in 1776, Smith complained of the cruelty of the world in taking him from them, Hume said: “No, no. Here am I, who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies; except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.” There are many other such stories.

 

How Adam Smith would fix capitalism | Financial Times

“It appears to me, the doing what little one can to encrease [sic] the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can in any likelihood pursue.”

Darwin. Letter to his sisters from the Beagle. Quoted in the London Review of Books 23-May-2019, Rosemary Hill.

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This is a little old, but I snapped it as I was passing through a hospital. It speaks volumes about the state of learning and engagement in the NHS.

Late night thoughts on medical education #7: Carousels

In the previous post I laid out some of the basic structures of the ‘clinical years’ of undergraduate medical degrees. In this post I want to delve a little deeper and highlight how things have gone wrong. I do not imagine it was ever wonderful, but it is certainly possible to argue that things have got a lot worse. I think things are indeed bad.

When I was a medical student in Newcastle in 1976-1982 the structure of the first two clinical years (years 3 and 4) were similar, whereas the final year (year 5) was distinct. The final year was made up of several long attachments — say ten weeks medicine and 10 weeks surgery — and there were no lectures or any demands on your time except that you effectively worked as an unpaid houseman, attached to a firm of two or three consultants. The apprenticeship system could work well during these attachments. The reasons for this partly reflected the fact that all parties had something to gain. Many if not most students chose where they did their attachments (‘if you like fellwalking, choose Carlisle etc), and had an eye on these units as a place to do your house jobs the following year. The consultants also had skin in the game. Instead of relying on interviews, or just exam results, they and all their staff (junior docs, nurses etc) got a chance to see close up what an individual student was like, and they could use this as a basis for appointing their houseperson the following year. If a houseman was away, you acted up, and got paid a small amount for this. At any time if you didn’t turn up, all hell would break out. You were essential to the functioning of the unit. No doubt there was some variation between units and centres, but this is how it was for me. So, for at least half of final year, you were on trial, immersed in learning by doing / learning on the job / workplace learning etc. All the right buzzwords were in place.

Carousels

As I have said, years 3 and 4 were different from final year, but similar to each other. The mornings would be spent on the ward and the afternoons — apart from Wednesdays — were for lectures. I didn’t like lectures (or at least those sort of lectures) so I skipped them apart from making sure that I collected any handouts which were provided on the first day (see some comments from Henry Miller on lectures below [1]).

The mornings were ‘on the wards’. Four year 3 students might be attached to two 30 bedded wards (one female, one male), and for most of the longer attachments you would be given a patient to go and see, starting at 9:30, breaking for coffee at 10:30 and returning for an hour or more in which one or more of you had to present you findings before visiting the bedside and being taught how to examine the patient. The number of students was small, and there was nowhere to hide, if you didn’t know anything.

For the longer attachments (10 weeks for each of paediatrics, medicine and surgery) this clinical exposure could work well. But the shorter attachments especially in year 4 were a problem, chiefly because you were not there long enough to get to know anybody.

The design problem was of course that the lectures were completely out of synchrony with the clinical attachments. You might be doing surgery in the morning, but listening to lectures on cardiology in the afternoon. Given my lack of love for lectures, I used the afternoons to read about patients I had seen in the morning, and to cover the subject of the afternoon lectures, by reading books.

I don’t want to pretend that all was well. It wasn’t. You might turn up to find that nobody was available to teach you, in which case we would retreat to the nurses canteen to eat the most bacon-rich bacon sandwiches I have ever had the pleasure of meeting (the women in the canteen thought all these young people needed building up with motherly love and food 🙂 ).

The knowledge of what you were supposed to learn was, to say the least, ‘informal’; at worst, anarchic. Some staff were amazingly helpful, but others — how shall I say — not so.

Year 5 envy

In reality, everybody knew that years 3 and 4 were pale imitations of year 5. The students wanted to be in year 5, because year 5 students — or at last most year 5 students — were useful. The problem was that the numbers (students and patients) and the staffing were not available. It was something to get through, but with occasional moments of hope and pleasure. Like going through security at airports: the holiday might be good, but you pay a price.

Present day

The easiest way to summarise what happens now is to provide a snapshot of teaching in my own subject at Edinburgh.

Year 4 (called year 5 now, but the penultimate year of undergraduate medicine) students spend two weeks in dermatology. Each group is made up of 12-15 students. At the beginning of a block of rotations lasting say 18 weeks in total, the students will have 2.5 hours of lectures on dermatology. During the two week dermatology rotation, most teaching will take place in the mornings. On the first morning the students have an orientation session, have to work in groups to answer some questions based on videos they have had to watch along with bespoke reading matter, and then there is an interactive ‘seminar’ going through some of the preparatory work in the videos and text material.

For the rest of the attachment students will attend a daily ‘teaching clinic’, in which they are taught on ‘index’ patients who attend the dermatology outpatients. These patients are selected from those attending the clinic and, if they agree, they pass through to the ‘teaching clinic’. The ‘teacher’ will be a consultant or registrar, and this person is there to teach — not to provide clinical care during this session.

Students will also sit in one ‘normal’ outpatient clinic as a ‘fly on the wall’, and attend one surgical session. At the end of the attachment, there is a quiz in which students attempt to answer questions in small groups of two or three. They also get an opportunity to provide oral feedback as well as anonymous written feedback. Our students rate dermatology highly in comparison with most other disciplines, and our NHS staff are motivated and like teaching.

The problems

When I read through the above it all sounds sort of reasonable, except that…

Students will pass though lots of these individual attachments. Some are four weeks long but many are only 1 or 2 weeks in duration. It is demanding to organise such timetables, and stressful for both students and staff

• each day a different staff member will teach the students
• it is unlikely that staff will know the names of most of the students. Students will usually not remember the name of the staff member who taught them in a previous week
• most teaching is delivered by non-university employed staff. Most of these staff have little detailed knowledge of what students are (now) expected to know. The majority will not be involved in any formal assessments, and reasonably view the teaching as a break from doing clinic after clinic.
• there is little opportunity to provide meaningful feedback on student performance, or to see student knowledge grow. Students find it easy to ‘hide’, and absenteeism is high and the rate of ‘illness’ seems higher than amongst hospital doctors.
• teaching the students plays second fiddle to service delivery. The terminology within NHS job plans is telling. When you see a patient it is called ‘direct clinical care (DCC)’. For maybe the remaining 10-20% of your time you have sessions allocated as ‘supporting professional activities (SPA)’. SPA time will include work relating to revalidation, CPD, hospital admin, teaching of registrars, and delivery of undergraduate teaching. Our overseas students pay in excess of 50K per year in fees, and each UK student attracts perhaps 50K from fees and government monies. Teaching undergraduates is merely a ‘supporting activity’ even when 50K is changing hands. Fettes or Winchester might be more careful with their terminology.

My critique is not concerned with the individuals, but the system. It is simply hard to believe that this whole edifice is coherent or designed in the students’ interest. It is, as Flexner described UK medical school teaching a century ago, wonderfully amateur. Pedagogically it makes little sense. Nor in all truthfulness is it enjoyable for many staff or many students. Each two weeks a new batch will arrive and groundhog days begins. Again. And again. And if you believe the figures bandied about for the cost of medical education, the value proposition seems poor. We could do better: we should do better.

[1] Lectures. Henry Miller, who was successively Dean of Medicine and Vice Chancellor at Newcastle described how…

“Afternoon lectures were often avoided in favour of the cinema. The medical school was conveniently placed for at least three large cinemas….in one particularly dull week of lectures we saw the Marx brothers in ‘A Day at the Races’ three times.”

Where’s the next frontier?

In a 1963 letter to molecular biologist Max Perutz, he wrote, “It is now widely realized that nearly all the ‘classical’ problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade…The future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.”

Sydney observed, and predicted, the flow of science: “Progress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order of decreasing importance,” he said.

Man, the toolmaker. In this particularly case, a very special one.

Sydney Brenner (1927–2019) | Science [Obit of Sydney Brenner]

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We will need even bigger prisons

Mr Kapoor’s co-defendants were Michael Gurry, Insys’s former vice-president of managed markets, Richard Simon, former national director of sales, and former regional sales directors Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan. Michael Babich, former chief executive of the company, and Alec Burklakoff, former vice-president of sales, had already pleaded guilty.

The defendants face up to 20 years in prison. Andrew Lelling, US attorney for Massachusetts, said it was “the first successful prosecution of top pharmaceutical executives for crimes related to the illicit marketing and prescribing of opioids”.

Insys founder convicted in opioid bribery case | Financial Times

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A diagnosis not to miss: email apnea

A phenomenon that occurs when a person opens their email inbox to find many unread messages, inducing a “fight-or-flight” response that causes the person to stop breathing.

James Williams, ‘Stand Out of Our Light’

I wonder when this will be recognised as a bona fide occupational disease.

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