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News: Student seminars

26 January 2009

Seminars examine best practice for student fitness to practise.

The GMC brought together representatives from UK medical schools in December to share best practice in student fitness to practise.

The London event, with attendees from Keele Medical School, the University of Manchester, and the University of Liverpool, was part of a series of seminars being held across the country to help those who are responsible for student fitness to practise to operate effective procedures.

As the GMC’s statutory functions do not extend to individual students’ fitness to practise, UK medical schools operate their own procedures when a student’s fitness to practise is in question.The GMC’s sessions are built around a number of hypothetical case studies which explore some of the most difficult student fitness to practise issues, such as plagiarism, drug offences and mental health issues.

The seminars also consider how these issues might affect registration with the GMC. The Manchester event was co-chaired by former GMC Council member, Robert Slack, who was also Chair of the Medical Student Professional Behaviour Committee in Bristol.

He said: ‘Until recently fitness to practise for students has been seen as a ‘Cinderella’ issue by many medical schools, and has resulted in very different procedures and possibly standards from one part of the UK toanother. We very much hope that this series of seminars will help to create some consistency both of the standards expected and, as far as possible, the application of fitness to practise procedures in the various universities.’

The Manchester event followed an earlier seminar held at the GMC’s London office in November 2008. Further events in Edinburgh and Bristol are being planned for 2009. Anyone interested in attending future seminars should contact Michael Cotton at mcotton@gmc-uk.org.