Thoughts on Medical Degree Apprenticeship

I do mostly agree with this. Do you mind me asking how many/the proportion of candidates with more of a scientific background/academically accomplished as the individual above? I agree that this makes it a very much viable option for those who can't make the time for a degree but have suitable qualifications, but I think there will also be many applicants with poorer achievements who are applying for the same position. In which case I think we land on the same argument we're having here- would we open apprenticeship programmes to just the highest-achieving candidates? or do we also offer these places to candidates who may have scored lower in their A-levels/degrees but have the academic potential/are capable of being doctors?

exactly. the point of degree apprenticeships is they are very difficult and for those who are a higher ability and can manage their time well enough to be successful. if youre a 50% time med student you wouldn't take double the time to complete the course - you would compress the course and do a lot more in less time. its difficult but much better than taking 10 years to complete a degree.

introducing apprenticeships will not lower the standards of doctors - in fact, i believe producing successful degree apprentices will improve the standards as it is much more challenging and you are assessed on your abilities in the workplace.

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I'm on a graduate entry programme. We study five years of medicine condensed into four years. I've completed a PhD and two postdoc fellowships, and this is by far the most time-consuming and intensive thing I've ever done (and that's saying something, because academia is infamous for terrible work-life balance). I don't see how it would be humanly possible to condense it even further and balance such intensity of study alongside work. This is nothing to do with intelligence. This is to do with basic human needs like sleep. It is not "widening participation" to remove A-level requirements and say instead, "You can only do this if you're capable of bending time, so instead of having four hours of lectures and seminars in a given day, you'll have eight - not counting self-directed learning, of course - and you'll work from the beginning. Oh, and you must be willing never to see family or friends because the laws of physics dictate that you won't have time or space for anything but medicine, so better make sure you don't have any children or other caring responsibilities!" I'm the first in my family to go to university (or get GCSEs, come to that) and I've seen this version of "widening participation" before, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds are expected to be phenomenally good and super-committed in order to receive an opportunity, while others get away with simply being very good. A lot of supposedly merit-based scholarships operate like this. This is not a viable way to address educational disadvantage.

We also don't know if your perception of the apprenticeships is correct (or if anybody's perception is correct) because virtually no details have been shared. Some people have claimed that the scheme will be exclusively for existing healthcare professionals who want to retrain in medicine, for example. It's all speculation at this point. The entry criteria are currently a great big unknown, as is the method of teaching. This is one reason why I'm sceptical - before I trust a plan, I like to see evidence that there is actually a plan, and right now all we have are unanswered questions.

A big one is this: what work could students perform that would both meet our educational needs and command a salary? Last week I spent a morning in theatre with the anaesthetists, who devoted as much time as they could spare to teaching me. This illustrates the problem: I need this experience from an early stage to help me learn pharmacology and anatomy, yet there was no useful assistance I could provide at my current level beyond the HCA work I've done in the past - and if I'd been working as a support worker/theatre runner there would have been no time for the anaesthetists to tell me anything. Degree apprenticeships can work in nursing because student nurses are able to assume a greater share of meaningful nursing responsibilities relatively early on, but with medicine it does take longer. We might say that Foundation and specialty training have apprenticeship-like elements. as theoretically it's senior doctors teaching more junior ones on the job, but by the time we get to that point we're able to work with autonomy. I definitely see the case for paid assistantships in the final year of med school, but before then? What exactly would we do? The way this scheme has been publicised without any attempt to answer the obvious questions makes me suspicious that this is just a poorly thought out attempt to produce doctors on a shoestring budget.

I'm on a graduate entry programme. We study five years of medicine condensed into four years. I've completed a PhD and two postdoc fellowships, and this is by far the most time-consuming and intensive thing I've ever done (and that's saying something, because academia is infamous for terrible work-life balance). I don't see how it would be humanly possible to condense it even further and balance such intensity of study alongside work. This is nothing to do with intelligence. This is to do with basic human needs like sleep. It is not "widening participation" to remove A-level requirements and say instead, "You can only do this if you're capable of bending time, so instead of having four hours of lectures and seminars in a given day, you'll have eight - not counting self-directed learning, of course - and you'll work from the beginning. Oh, and you must be willing never to see family or friends because the laws of physics dictate that you won't have time or space for anything but medicine, so better make sure you don't have any children or other caring responsibilities!" I'm the first in my family to go to university (or get GCSEs, come to that) and I've seen this version of "widening participation" before, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds are expected to be phenomenally good and super-committed in order to receive an opportunity, while others get away with simply being very good. A lot of supposedly merit-based scholarships operate like this. This is not a viable way to address educational disadvantage.

We also don't know if your perception of the apprenticeships is correct (or if anybody's perception is correct) because virtually no details have been shared. Some people have claimed that the scheme will be exclusively for existing healthcare professionals who want to retrain in medicine, for example. It's all speculation at this point. The entry criteria are currently a great big unknown, as is the method of teaching. This is one reason why I'm sceptical - before I trust a plan, I like to see evidence that there is actually a plan, and right now all we have are unanswered questions.

A big one is this: what work could students perform that would both meet our educational needs and command a salary? Last week I spent a morning in theatre with the anaesthetists, who devoted as much time as they could spare to teaching me. This illustrates the problem: I need this experience from an early stage to help me learn pharmacology and anatomy, yet there was no useful assistance I could provide at my current level beyond the HCA work I've done in the past - and if I'd been working as a support worker/theatre runner there would have been no time for the anaesthetists to tell me anything. Degree apprenticeships can work in nursing because student nurses are able to assume a greater share of meaningful nursing responsibilities relatively early on, but with medicine it does take longer. We might say that Foundation and specialty training have apprenticeship-like elements. as theoretically it's senior doctors teaching more junior ones on the job, but by the time we get to that point we're able to work with autonomy. I definitely see the case for paid assistantships in the final year of med school, but before then? What exactly would we do? The way this scheme has been publicised without any attempt to answer the obvious questions makes me suspicious that this is just a poorly thought out attempt to produce doctors on a shoestring budget.