Gateways guidance: 10.1 Identifying student requirements
As explained previously, it is recommended that as far as possible selection is separated from consideration of an interviewee’s impairments. Once the applicant is selected, however, the student’s requirements and any related reasonable adjustments must be addressed before the course begins.
- ‘About six months before I was due to start at Cambridge, the new dean contacted me, asking if I would like to meet up. I mentioned about adapted stethoscopes, and she soon had the technician at the clinical skills department on the case. He did quite a bit of research, and came up with a number of options for stethoscopes that would be useful. I went back a couple of months later, and was able to try out the stethoscopes that most interested me.’
Medical student
It is common practice to ask all applicants who have been offered a place to complete a health assessment form. A letter and form have been drawn up by a working party of seven medical schools along with the Higher Education Occupational Practitioners group (HEOPS) and a version is included on the GMC website. The form is designed to identify in advance anyone who will need support to help overcome barriers presented by the course. It is also designed to identify anyone who is currently unwell or still recovering from a serious illness so that they might be advised to defer entry until they have recovered. This could be seen as a reasonable adjustment to accommodate a person with an impairment or health condition. Schools may also wish to afford this opportunity to people with temporary impairments, even though people with impairments of less than 12 months’ duration are unlikely to be covered by the Equality Act.
The disability officer should be informed when a disabled applicant is offered a place so that the process of agreeing reasonable adjustments can be started. The disability officer should involve the student, the course leader, the occupational health physician and specialist organisations in deciding what reasonable adjustments are needed.
Enrolment and induction offer further opportunities to gather information from disabled students about their requirements. It is important at this point to use accessible venues and to provide disabled people with an opportunity to discuss their impairment and any reasonable adjustment requirements in confidence.
It is worth noting that the new provision under the Equality Act concerning discrimination arising from a disability requires medical schools to take steps to find out about an applicant’s disability. This is because a medical school could be liable for unlawful discrimination if the school could reasonably be expected to know about an applicant’s disability or if the school has been told.
The University of Aberdeen has recently introduced a new admissions procedure which gives all medical applicants and students access to occupational health services. Occupational health staff will only assess students who have a confirmed place to study at the University of Aberdeen. The purpose of this procedure is twofold: to identify the need for any reasonable adjustments that would enable students to complete their course; and to ensure that patients are not put at risk by, for example, students with a blood-borne virus infection conducting exposure prone procedures. Recommendations relating to adjustments in the clinical and educational setting will be made by the occupational health advisers and the university’s disability advisers. Both services will continue to support students, as necessary, throughout their studies. In the exceptional situation where any serious issues of health or disability may not be compatible with achieving the outcomes set out in Tomorrow's Doctors, the relevant Occupational Health report would be considered by the Admissions Dean in consultation with the Associate Dean (Undergraduate Medicine) and the Head of School of Medicine.