Essay competition 2006: Medical students category
On this page you can see the results of the GMC's essay competition in the Medical Student category and read the winning entries.
The essay title entrants were set was: What will be expected of doctors in the future?
Results
The winner and runners-up are below. Click on the link to view information and read the essay or scroll down to read about all the winning entries.
Winner: Gary Cooney
This essay is based on the following ideas
- Biomedical advances, particularly in the realm of genetics and pharmacogenetics, will lead to greater life expectancy resulting in a large increase in elderly members of society.
- This demographic change will create a growing burden on health care services, with more resources being channelled towards an increasing dependent sector of the population.
- As patient health becomes more genetically determined, doctors in their training, research and practice will focus less on environmental causes of disease.
- Doctors will be entrusted with a great deal of confidential information arising from patient genetic codes; they will be expected to make use of this knowledge in a directed, specified manner.
- There will be a notable imbalance between an excess of biomedical knowledge and an uncertainty of what to do with it, however doctors will be expected to act uniformly, though they may disagree on the pathway their profession is taking.
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Download Gary Cooney's essay (157kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Christopher Hands
This essay is based on the following ideas
- The diminishing role of the physician in performing clinical procedures
- The increasing dominance of computer-aided decision-making as an adjunct or alternative to clinical judgment
- The move of health care provision from a secondary to a primary context
- The greater emphasis on prevention, and care rather than cure
- The shift of a doctor's role from the provider of health care to the provider of more general guidance to the community at large.
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Download Christopher Hands' essay (210kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Ashish Marwaha
This essay is based on the following ideas
- Changes within the NHS : The introduction of an NHS tax and biotechnological companies taking over the running of hospitals following the failure of repayment on the Private Finance Initiatives. Primary care now takes on the vast majority of operations in GP ‘mega-surgeries' serving large areas of the community.
- Training/working hours : As a medical student and junior doctor. There is a contractual obligation for doctors to teach and to be trained. The working hours and time to become a consultant have reduced but there is also a fall in pay and an obligation to work at night as a general consultant before you can specialise.
- Role of nursing: Nurses are able to prescribe and have encroached into the traditional role of a doctor. The gap between nurses and junior doctors is much less in terms of pay and care of the patient.
- Litigation: The increase in litigation has increased insurance premiums for doctors further reducing pay. The doctors must follow NICE issued care pathways for every patient and must re-register with the GMC every 3 years to prove core competence.
- Technological advance: There are no paper records and every doctor carries a PDA with updated electronic patient information accessible anywhere in the hospital. Organs can be grown from adult stem cells in a laboratory. This has made organ replacement the main treatment for most major diseases.
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Download Ashish Marwaha's essay (104kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Kieran Mullan
This essay is based on the following ideas
- The short tale of one man and his doctor.
- Will GOD be the answer to our problems?
- Insufferable pain?
- Perfection?
- Medicine without boundaries?
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Download Kieran Mullan's essay (193kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Laura Spence
This essay is based on the following ideas
- Greater levels of specialist knowledge and skill continually progressing via sound clinical governance.
- Understanding and debating the ethical questions raised by the advancement of medical science
- Maintaining a strong sense of professional identity, based on commitment to the health of individuals, populations and society.
- Being flexible in the face of social, political and economic change
- Collaborating across professional and international boundaries.
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Download Laura Spence's essay (45kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Jennifer Strawson
This essay is based on the following ideas
- Abolition of the NHS in favour of private medical practice
- Technology centred care - the doctor as technician
- The inhumanity of medicine, the art of medicine versus the science
- The extinction of General Practice and the reign of the Specialist
- Medicine gone too far – a warning
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Download Jennifer Strawson's essay (42kb, pdf)
Runner-up: Nathalie Turpin
This essay is based on the following ideas
- The growing amount of medical information to be found online and the education of the public as part of the doctor's role.
- An example of technology to be used in the future, how doctors may have to adapt, and a brief look at the role doctors will have to play in Genetic Counselling
- The growing culture nutritional therapy and of alternative medicine and what will be expected of doctors.
- Describing the effects of an ageing population on the doctor's workload and role in their care.
- Final word: The core values expected by the public.
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Download Nathalie Turpin's essay (111kb, pdf)