What's the oldest age you would likely be accepted on a medicine course

Yeah, we all thought that once.

I'm not saying you won't cope, but that it's not something to be dismissed.

so if you already have a an undergrad degree, you cannot apply for normal medicine? surely there are 5 year courses for graduates or are there only 4 year ones

I'm mistaken, there are a couple of graduates on my 5 yr course, in fact one person even has a masters. Not sure about how they're considered in comparison to undergraduates though. I know that for graduate medicine you definitely need a degree though

Well no **** Sherlock.

Was there any need for that? :P I just wanted to be clear because I got negged earlier

Well it just seemed like you were desperately trying to somehow qualify what you said earlier (which, as mentioned, was wrong) to save face, when you could have just stuck with accepting you were wrong, rather than adding on a Captain Obvious moment. But apologies if it came across as harsh.

the drop out rate is a good point, but there are fewer older med students than there are school leavers

You've missed my point.

If you're working 20-25 years full time, the NHS is getting a good 60% of the time they'd get out of a 18 year old. That can be justified. I specifically quoted people who said they knew med students who were 49 and 51. Those guys are going to have barely 10 years to work before they retire, almost all of which will still be 'training', even if they continue to 65. In order for them to be worth the money, they need to be many times better than your standard 18 year old. They need to be truly, truly exceptional for that to be economically justified. But maybe that is the case, i dunno.

Do you have a link to that article btw?

Ok, few points I'd like to put forward for consideration here:
1) Older students have paid significant amounts into the tax system during their working lives. My already paid tax is helping to train the younger students as well as the older ones.
2) How do you measure someone's professional 'worth'?
3) Just because someone is 'training' doesn't mean they are contributing nothing to patients during that time. Certainly, once in F1/F2 doctors are making a significant contribution. None of us ever stops learning/training.
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1) So you're suggesting admitting medical students based on how much tax they have paid in the past? As a kind of reward for paying tax? Because that is certainly not what happens now. There is no guarantee whatsoever that any given 50 year old has paid more tax than they've benefited from already.
2) Its difficult. One objective measure would be time though, which is exactly why i'm surprised that med schools are happy to take on someone with less than 10 years worth of career prospects.
3) Sure, but they are not worth as much as a trained consultant doing the same job. You will get some value out of a 10 year career, but much less than a 40 year career clearly, which is the point.

No, I haven't suggested anything about admitting medical students based on tax paid in the past.

I really don't see how else point 1) can be interpreted.



All of which no one disputes.



I... really don't see how you can say that. Medical training has a particular cost. That cost is either divided over 10 years or over 40. You can argue that the additional cost is worth it, but not that it doesn't exist, because it clearly does.



Precisely. By training people who have shorter career spans you are asserting that you are going to gain more out of one person than another. This is difficult to judge. Therefore, how can you justify that as you hit very short career spans?

I take it, for example, that you would not advocate spending more than £100,000 training a 59 year old who will work for 1 year? This is just where you draw the line. You are arguing that you can take a given 50 year old and say that his 10 years as a doctor will be worth the same as 40 years of an 18y/o. I'm saying there is a lot of uncertainty and many factors to consider and i'd like to see how they justify that because the difference required would be pretty huge.

What on earth is the point in training these guys? By the time the med school and NHS has spent £100,000+ training them they'll literally be retiring! Those guys will need to be absolutely phenomenal foundation doctors or they'll just be a massive drain on the system.

I think in my year the oldest undergrad was about 25 and oldest grad about 35.

EDIT: it would be great if any one of the neggers made any attempt to explain how they can justify training a 51 year old...

Or perhaps that restriction should be placed at the post graduate level, which would allow anyone to gain medical training, but not become doctors?