TSR Med Students' Society Part III

Barts have a spiral curriculum too which means you revisit systems throughout both years on the pre-clinical course and atleast once more on the clinical course. You in essence touch on old stuff from first year in second year and build on it. Kinda works.

I met with the external examiners last week to talk about our exams and assessments ad stuff and one of them was from PMS. She was really nice actually and mentioned some things that Peninsula shared in common with the Barts teaching system. The lady from Georges also did this. It is surprising how similar bits of our courses are.

The first two years at George's are accumulative and the top 7.5% get Medical Sciences (Distinction) and the top 20% get Medical Sciences (Merit).

I want to rape these last exams but I'm bricking it.

I am not anti change because it is change, but the UCL curriculum has worked and turned out good doctors for years and years, whereas the Peninsula method has only just had its first few batches - I'm just not sure you need to radically change something that is working. The students don't want it, alot of the consultants don't want it - they say we get loaded with PDS and cuddly social/communication type stuff before we've learned medicine and how to help patients through diagnosis and treatment...a case in point would be all the PDS ethics and law through the first 2 years, my memories are that whenever the discussion got really interesting, ie off prescribed topic, we er ran out of time. Add to that the fact that all we needed to know which took weeks and weeks of sessions was summerised in an hour - it does make me wonder how much of it is necessary.

Styles of Teaching and examination that work well, almost always get rolled out across the field. Its only what we would expect.

Random epiphany just now - have the guys over at UEA always been "Norwich Medical School"??

Well done!!!

I find it quite interesting how some unis just use a simple pass/fail/merit/distinction method when others like yours give you degree classifications and others give grades as in A Level. Its all so fascinating really....aaaaand I'm clearly getting well excited over something way too trivial.

Just because something has worked does not mean that it will continue to work as the NHS and Medicine in general evolve. It is the responsibly of medical education to move forwards and adapt to an adapting NHS and to an evolving medical field.

Medical Education should always follow the evidence not tradition, the same way the Medical field follows the evidence. This is the era of evidence-based medicine and medical education.

Just because something has worked does not mean that it will continue to work as the NHS and Medicine in general evolve. It is the responsibly of medical education to move forwards and adapt to an adapting NHS and to an evolving medical field.

Medical Education should always follow the evidence not tradition, the same way the Medical field follows the evidence. This is the era of evidence-based medicine and medical education.

Yeah I agree - that's really good thing! It's only natural to want to pick up good practices from some medical schools to bring back to yours and to also go "oh, we'd never want to do that here" about the bad stuff.

Now I think this might be in some degree pride towards my medical school...

Where is the evidence to show that Peninsula's teaching methods are objectively better? After all, as we both know, trials of new things can go either way, and the sample size of Peninsula is small compared to other courses.

All this talk of evolution - medicine and medical practice do not change that quickly, after all, the 'traditional' unis still turn out good doctors, yes? In some ways all medical education is spiral - because it has to be cummilative.

Show me the evidence, otherwise this is like having a discussion with an infection control poster.

See I've noticed a gradual creep toward MCQs from essay type questions, and then we moved onto computer based marking. The cynical part of me says that financial considerations must also have a finger in the pie - after all, automated computer marking using computer rooms the university already has is probably cheaper than having examiners and external examiners mark and moderate 300 odd essay type papers....

Now I'm not saying standards drop because of SBA questions - they are bastardly hard, but I think essays are good in a way because you have to plan and think logically from scratch, and you can elaborate on why you think what you do. I just think there are also other considerations that may not be so medically innovative as finanically astute. Of course, finances in the current enviroment are scarce, so everything has to be considered carefully, but it might be worth factoring this into discussions.

No. We changed about a month or so ago

To be fair when I greet patients I say "a first year medical student at the University of East Anglia" rather than "from Norwich Medical School"

Although how do you know what our new name is?

No I wouldn't bother - everyone seems to get pretty fed up by the end of second year, is a long slog so do take a nice break this summer!

Got my OSCE feedback today, considering how I did overall was rather disappointed to have scored so average. I guess it's just a lack of practice though, still think it's pretty silly to even have a year 2 OSCE when most of the things I was examined on I've either done once or never before. Better use these next 3 years to pratice pretty hard!

How do they even decide satisfaction? I've never filled in/ seen someone fill in a survey.

How do they even decide satisfaction? I've never filled in/ seen someone fill in a survey.

How do they even decide satisfaction? I've never filled in/ seen someone fill in a survey.