Medical students to have more ‘hands on’ experience

New GMC guidance launched today will ensure medical students have more opportunity to apply their medical knowledge and skills in hospitals and surgeries before they graduate.

The guidance, a new version of Tomorrow’s Doctors, will require medical schools and the NHS to work together to organise ‘student assistantships’. Moreover, medical schools will need to teach specified ‘hard science’ subjects and work to a standardized list of clinical procedures that students will be competent to undertake before graduation.

• Student assistantships
  The student assistantships are new placements undertaken shortly before a student enters ‘Foundation 1’ as a trainee doctor.  They will help students become more familiar with work in a hospital or community setting and to understand practical tasks such as filling in a prescription form or ordering a blood sample. 
  
  Students will assist a junior doctor, become familiar with the workplace and undertake supervised procedures.
  
• Hard science
  The guidance sets down new requirements to prepare ‘The doctor as a scholar and a scientist’ covering sciences such as anatomy, genetics and molecular biology.
  
• Clinical practice
  The guidance includes a new list of specific clinical procedures like administering a local anaesthetic which students must master before they graduate. This list ensures students are able to take advantage of advances in medical technology that allows increasingly lifelike training mannequins to be used for clinical procedures, as well as developing skills on real patients with consent and under supervision.

GMC Council Member and Chair of the Under Graduate Board Jim McKillop said: “New medical graduates must be scholars and scientists, practitioners and professionals. Tomorrow’s Doctors 2009 ensures medical schools will achieve the balance between teaching students the building blocks of medical science while ensuring they know how to communicate with patients and master basic clinical procedures.

“Basic medical knowledge and skills, while fundamentally important, are no good in isolation. The best doctors are continually updating their knowledge, they are prepared to ask for help and they can communicate complex, life changing decisions to patients who can often be vulnerable and scared.  It is impossible to prepare students for every eventuality in their career but it is possible to lay strong foundations to help today’s medical students become Tomorrow’s Doctors.”

Tomorrow’s Doctors 2009 is the third edition of guidance first published in 1993. It sets out the GMC’s requirements for the knowledge, skills and behaviours that undergraduate medical students should learn and for the delivery of teaching, learning and assessment. These standards provide the framework that UK medical schools use to design their own detailed curricula and schemes of assessment. Tomorrow’s Doctors 2009 reflects changes in healthcare and new opportunities for learning. The quality of undergraduate teaching and assessments is tested against these standards by our Quality Assurance of Basic Medical Education (QABME) programme, which will be revised to reflect the new edition of Tomorrow’s Doctors.