Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift

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  • 20/10/2017

    Is it medical education or medical training? This is almost an age-old question, one that I am not going to resolve here. But every generation has to ask it anew. Not least because the sands of time keep moving.

    In undergraduate medicine, in 2017, I fear we have got this wrong in a big way. Just when the future looks ever more uncertain, when we have to consider how much traditional ideas of medical careers — and even how we conceptualise doctors — is up for grabs, we are ever more focussed on short term goals: not medical education, but short term training (‘produce FY1 doctors’). But of course, the purpose of medical eduction is not to produce FY1 doctors — that is like saying that passing tests is the purpose of education. The purpose of medical education is to equip students to work (usually) in medicine for a lifetime. Graduates must be able to start learning safely in a clinical environment, but the purpose is not to be FY1’s or core medical trainees.

    But the other reason that this problem needs revisiting, is that medical education was framed in time when few people went to university, and when spending five years at university seemed unusual. No matter that much of it was ‘training’ rather than education: by comparison with ‘average’ there was some education in there. But what I fear now is that many medical students are being left behind, increasingly ‘trained’ for one employer and one niche, at the cost of their education. A niche that is threatened by ecological change. And to echo a theme of the day, young people are being made to pay (via debt) for what many other corporations rightly accept is their ‘training’ responsibility.

    Now, I do not see the solution in making medicine a postgraduate degree (for most), but I think we can start meaningfully thinking about what I would call ‘medicine plus’ degrees. Doing this, means we have to start unpicking ‘training’ and ‘education’ in ways that do not increase costs, and with an eye on the student’s future, not that of the NHS.

    MIT’s WoodyFlowers has some interesting things to say in a completely different context (that of the failure of the MOOC movement), but which I think we can meld to our purpose .

    The missed opportunity, I argued, involved recognition that education and training are different and that training could be dramatically improved through use of well structured, high quality modules that would help students train themself so person-to-person time could be used for education. Essentially the strategy would outsource training and nonjudgmental grading to digital systems, and thereby free instructors to serve as mentors.

    Woodie Flowers

    Title: borrowed from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. There are lots of lines that students of the fees era would do well to reflect on, including: “Don’t follow leaders, Watch the parkin’ meters”.