The Irish Times - Friday, June 1, 2012

SEN FLYNN, Education Editor

THE NEW entry and selection test for entry to medicine known as the Hpat has done little to widen access to the profession, according to a draft review for the Higher Education Authority.

The review also concludes that students who can afford to take expensive preparatory courses for the Hpat (Health Professions Admission Test) outperform others despite claims the exam presents a level playing field for all students. More than 50 per cent of Hpat candidates take commercial coaching courses, the review states.

The review by the medical schools and other experts concludes that students who repeat the Hpat perform significantly better.

In all, one-third of successful applicants in the past two years were actually repeat candidates, with many of them dropping out of other much-coveted college courses. More than 85 per cent of students who repeated the exam improved their scores.

The findings are unlikely to be welcomed by the Department of Education, which has promoted the Hpat as a new-style exam where compared to the Leaving Cert there is less reliance on rote learning.

But medical schools will be under pressure to make changes before the 2013 exam next February.

Education sources say possible changes include:

* Hpat scores will be valid for a period of one year only;

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Medical school entry test fails to widen access to profession

ATLANTA The Morehouse School of Medicine is creating what is being called the first endowed chair on sexuality and religion at a U.S. medical school.

The Atlanta medical school on Thursday announced it raised $2 million for the endowed chair, and it will begin a one-year national search to hire someone to fill it.

The chairperson will develop ways to train physicians and theologians on a wide range of sexual health issues that include contraception, rape prevention, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

The chair will report to Dr. David Satcher, a former U.S. Surgeon General who issued a controversial report on sexual health in 2001. Satcher is now a Morehouse administrator.

A spokeswoman for the Association of American Medical Colleges said she was not aware of a similar endowed chair anywhere else.

Satcher and others at Morehouse previously coordinated national panel discussions on sexual health that involved organizations ranging from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The medical school, founded in 1975, has an enrollment of about 300. It is separate from Morehouse College, a historically black university located across the street.

The medical school previously created an endowed chair for mental health issues, which was co-funded by entertainer Bill Cosby and child psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint. Satcher occupies that position.

The new chair is named for two Florida-based benefactors the Rev. Marta Weeks, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the Rev. David Richards, a retired Episcopal bishop.

The chair will teach at Morehouse but will also be expected to work with other medical schools and religious academic institutions to help shape curricula elsewhere.

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First endowed medical school chair created in Ga. to focus on sexuality and religion

The Morehouse School of Medicine is creating what is being called the first endowed chair on sexuality and religion at a U.S. medical school.

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Med school chair created on sexuality and religion

29-05-2012 00:23 Cancer and diet,inut from Nature*.

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YouTube Medical School Cancer and Diet - Video

NORTH BRUNSWICK, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Ross University School of Medicine (RUSM) and Kern Medical Center (KMC) in Bakersfield, Calif. today announced a 10-year affiliation agreement to allocate, on an annual basis, a significant number of core clinical rotation slots to RUSM students. The affiliation, which will allow RUSM students placed at KMC to complete all of their third-year clinical rotations there over 48 consecutive weeks, is the largest clinical affiliation arrangement in RUSMs history.

Kern Medical Center, established in 1867, is a 222-bed acute care teaching hospital owned and operated by the County of Kern. As the major healthcare provider serving a community of approximately 650,000 residents, KMC is an integral part of the local community. KMC provides care for more than 16,000 inpatients annually, and experiences 43,000 Emergency Room visits per year. In addition, KMCs three federally qualified health centers serve 100,000 outpatients per year.

This is a landmark development for Ross for many reasons, especially for the opportunity to work closely with an institution that shares our commitment to serving the local community, said Joseph Flaherty, MD, dean and chancellor of RUSM. RUSM students who complete their rotations at Kern will not only benefit from learning from Kerns great faculty and residents, but also gain an appreciation for the important role these community hospitals and their physicians play in the lives of local families.

All of KMCs core residency programsInternal Medicine, Family Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Psychiatryare accredited by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). KMCs affiliations with the University of California at Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine and University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine ensure a significant depth and breadth of teaching resources, in addition to KMCs 65 full-time faculty physicians.

Paul Hensler, FACHE, chief executive officer at KMC, said that RUSM is a partner that shares Kern Medical Centers academic vision. The affiliation, he said, is geared to looking after the long-term sustainability of the local physician workforce. California in general and the San Joaquin Valley in particular are medically underserved. We believe that building a robust working relationship with RUSM will enable us to provide a superior clinical rotation experience with the potential to attract physicians to our community, said Hensler.

Enrique Fernandez, MD, senior associate dean for clinical sciences at RUSM, said the new affiliation is great news for current students, seventeen percent of whom are from California. Many of our students have already set a goal of returning to their home communities to practice medicine. This partnership will enable many of them to complete their clinical clerkships in California as well, he said.

As part of the agreement, RUSM and KMC will offer scholarships to accepted RUSM students from Kern County, via the Kern Medical Center Foundation.

About Ross University School of Medicine

Ross University School of Medicine (RUSM) was founded in 1978 and is a provider of medical education offering a Doctor of Medicine degree program. Students begin their foundational studies in Dominica, West Indies, and complete their clinical training in teaching hospitals throughout the United States. RUSM graduates obtain more US residencies than graduates of any other medical school in the world.

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Ross University School of Medicine Signs Affiliation Agreement to Enhance Clinical Education with Kern Medical Center

The high cost of medical school often gets tossed around as a key reason why doctors dont go into primary care jobs, instead choosing specialties such as radiology and surgery that prove more lucrative. When physicians graduate with an average of $161,290 in debt, its hard (Melissa Cannarozzi/The Washington Post) to see money not factoring into career decisions.

While this narrative makes sense, theres one major flaw: It doesnt seem to be true. Aaron Carroll flags a story in the San Francisco-area Bay Citizen, where a local health-care authority established a loan forgiveness program. If doctors committed to practicing primary care in the area, for at least four years, all of their loans would be forgiven.

The program has been around for a decade now and no one has signed up. Not a single doctor has volunteered for the opportunity to have all of their educational debt relieved. In San Mateo County, at least, debt didnt seem to be the big obstacle for doctors pursuing primary care careers.

This doesnt seem to be specific to one area of California. National data on medical student debt find that those with a high debt burden are actually more likely to go into the less lucrative primary care fields than doctors who hold no loans at all.

For private schools, odds of choosing primary care increases as debt increases, with those having no debt (and no scholarships) less likely to choose primary care, researchers at the Robert Graham Center concluded in a 2009 report.

Why do those with a higher-debt burden go into lower paying medical fields? Debt-free doctors, the thinking goes, come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and tend to have higher expectations for their eventual salary.

For those who come from a less advantaged background, and do take out loans, the calculus might be a bit different. You have people who are willing to tolerate up to $200,000 in debt to become a doctor, Robert Phillips, director of the Robert Graham Center, said in a recent interview. To him, it suggests that doctors who have already made a huge financial commitment to becoming a physician arent as concerned with their eventual salary.

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Maybe medical school debt isn’t the problem

Kudos to University of Miami Medical School Dean Pascal Goldschmidt on restructuring the school.

The average UM med school student graduates with close to a $200,000 debt, deterring him or her from going into lower-paying but much-needed primary care, opting instead for the more lucrative specialties to pay off the education debt.

With UM med school administrators drawing salaries in the $800,000 range, eliminating positions and decreasing others to a very comfortable $400,000 range should free up enough money to allow many students to graduate debt free. As an alumnus in solo family medicine concerned about the lack of future doctors to care for my patients, I feel that the dean is right on target.

Charles A. Dunn M.D., Coral Gables

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Good move at UM

BY KELLIE SCHMITT Californian staff writer kschmitt@bakersfield.com Tuesday, May 29 2012 03:26 PM

Kern County supervisors unanimously approved a unique proposal to give Ross University in the Caribbean the vast majority of Kern Medical Center's student rotation slots in exchange for $35 million over 10 years.

"This provides KMC and Ross the ability to enhance their program offerings," said Supervisor Ray Watson. "In the long term, this will be good for the health of Kern County. I think it's a step forward both financially and in terms of the education we can provide."

The new arrangement will give Ross, which is located on the island of Dominica, about 100 medical school rotations. Medical students typically spend their first two years focusing on academics and their last two rotating through hospitals to learn clinical expertise under close supervision.

They are different from the residents at KMC, who study a specialty there after graduating from medical school.

While California-based medical schools have affiliations with nearby hospitals that allow free student rotations, Caribbean schools often pay to allow their students to train in the United States.

It's tough for offshore schools like Ross to secure rotations in U.S. hospitals, especially in California, the home of nearly 18 percent of its students. That's why officials were willing to dole out $35 million, the highest amount the school has ever offered a hospital for rotations, officials said.

"We thought we could provide something good for U.S. students and the community," said Ross Dean Joseph Flaherty.

While Caribbean schools have a reputation for attracting students who can't get in to U.S. schools, KMC CEO Paul Hensler said Ross' test scores and students are highly competitive; there just aren't enough medical school slots nationwide.

And, since there likely won't be a medical school in the Central Valley anytime soon, a close affiliation with a top Caribbean school is a good option for funneling physicians into Kern County, Hensler said.

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Supervisors approve $35 million deal with Caribbean medical school

by Cheryl Tay

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New medical school breaks ground at Novena Campus

Singapore, 26 May 2012 The second class of DukeNUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) students marked the completion of their fouryear Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) training today. Mr. Heng Swee Keat, Singapores Minister for Education, graced the schools pregraduation celebration held in the auditorium of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music at the National University of Singapore. The distinguished Professor Sydney Brenner, Nobel Laureate in Medicine 2002, was the event's keynote speaker.

This cohort of DukeNUS graduands will further receive training as postgraduate year one doctors who will provide clinical care as vital members of the healthcare team. They may be trained under the Residency Programmes in specialties such as Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ophthalmology, Orthopaedic Surgery, Otorhinolaryngology, Paediatrics and Psychiatry, among other fields.

Mr Heng Swee Keat, Minister for Education, said: With its intensive focus on research and its unique feature of taking in graduate-entry students from a variety of academic backgrounds, but who share a common passion of serving others, Duke-NUS produces doctors with a diversity of insights and perspectives, and brings together different strengths and expertise to continually innovate and improve on the healthcare provision for Singaporeans.

Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, NUS President, said: Today, we celebrate with pride the remarkable accomplishments of Duke-NUS Class of 2012. Over the last four years, these students have been immersed in the Duke-NUS culture of excellence, boldness and imagination; and they have benefitted greatly from the innovative clinical and research training. The rigorous training and exposure will enable our graduands to make a real difference to patients, our community and society. We are confident these graduands will become role models for future generations of clinicians and clinician-scientists who will transform medicine through research and innovation. My heartiest congratulations to the Class of 2012!

It is clear that the innovative approach to medical education, clinical and basic research embodied by Duke-NUS is producing an extraordinary calibre of clinician-scientists who are uniquely equipped to become the healthcare and research leaders of the future, said Dr. Victor J. Dzau. Never before has there been as great a need for clinician-scientists who can not only engage in discovery science, but can translate discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic and improve the health of patients and the community. I have great pride and expectations for the class of 2012. Dr. Victor J. Dzau, Chancellor for Health Affairs, Duke University, and CEO, Duke University Health System, was in Singapore to grace the hooding ceremony.

I am proud to see that our graduands are starting a new chapter in their lives. They will work as critical members of clinical healthcare teams, to bring hope and relief to patients and their families. We hope they will continue to let their passion for medicine and their spirit of inquiry and curiosity drive future discoveries in patient and disease management, said Professor Ranga Krishnan, Dean of the DukeNUS.

Duke-NUS had five annual intakes since its M.D. programme started in August 2007. Since then, the school has admitted more than 240 post-baccalaureate students into its Americanstyled, researchoriented, four-year medical school programme. These students come from a diverse range of local and international undergraduate institutions. These include: National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Peking University, Chinese University in Hong Kong, University of Mumbai, University of Philippines, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Duke University, Harvard University, and others.

The DukeNUS graduands will receive a joint Duke and NUS M.D. degree at the NUSCommencement Ceremony on 7 July 2012.

In addition to its 240-strong M.D. cohort, the school has over 20 students in itsPhD programme track. This track enables research-oriented medical students to leverage on their biomedicine knowledge to spur translational research aimed at developing better patient treatment, strategies and technology.

Duke-NUS Class of 2012 - Graduation Celebration & Hooding Ceremony, May 26, 2012

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Duke-NUS Medical School Marks Second Graduation

Medical school cleaners secure London living wage

7:40am Tuesday 29th May 2012 in News By Alexandra Rucki

Campaigning cleaners were celebrating after securing a pay increase up to the London living wage.

The cleaners for St George's Hospital Medical School, housed within St George's Hospital, Tooting, have been running a campaign for increased pay through posters, leafleting and petitions.

They will be paid a new hourly rate of 8.30 per hour from August 1, an increase from their current wage of 6.08 an hour after UNISON signed a deal with contractors Ocean Contract Cleaning Ltd.

However, trade union Industrial Workers for the World (IWW) have said the cleaners could face having their hours cut, which would make the pay rise futile.

UNISON have denied signing anything agreeing to cuts, with a spokesperson accusing IWW of being an anarchist group.

A protest to raise awareness of the issue was staged by IWW outside St George's Hospital last Friday, May 25.

Cleaners, medical students and families took part to raise awareness staff were being paid below the London wage.

A spokesperson for UNISON said: "We managed to secure the London living wage for hospital staff, but never for the teaching school.

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Medical school cleaners secure London living wage

The Bossier Chamber of Commerce is speaking out against proposed budget cuts to the LSU Health Shreveport School of Medicine. The group is urging members to write to lawmakers asking that they restore $25 million in proposed cuts. Click here to view the email.

The cuts are part of House Bill 1, which goes to the Senate floor this week. If the proposed cuts are approved, officials say the hospital would eventually collapse.

With 6,000 employees, the hospital is Shreveport-Bossier's largest employer and generates about $773 million annually in economic development in the community.

The LSU Health Shreveport School of Medicine treats approximately 400,000 patients a year and produces 70 percent of the doctors who practice medicine in Louisiana.

Copyright 2012 KTBS. All rights reserved.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bossier Chamber urges funding for LSU Medical School

SINGAPORE: The new Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine would further diversify Singapore's higher education landscape and create more opportunities for Singaporeans locally, Minister for Education Heng Swee Keat said on Monday.

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New medical school creates more opportunities: Heng Swee Keat

Singapore's third medical school held a ground-breaking ceremony for its two campuses on Monday afternoon. Due to start class next August, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine will have one campus at Mandalay Road near Tan Tock Seng Hospital and another in the Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) biomedical-engineering cluster. Related Stories New dawn for Kirsten Koh as she completes ...

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Singapore's 3rd medical school holds ground-breaking ceremony

JERUSALEM Israeli medical student Mohammad Hijazi seems the ideal candidate to alleviate the country's looming doctor shortage.

He graduated first in his high school class, scored in the top 5% of Israel's version of the SAT and rounded out his resume by founding a grass-roots organization that encourages blood donation.

"And it works," said Hijazi, 25, who is now pursuing a medical degree in Poland.

High enrollment in medical schools has long been a rare success story for Israel's 1.6 million Arab Israelis, who complain of discrimination by the government in many spheres of their lives.

Nationwide, an estimated 19% of medical school students are Arab, according to a 2009 parliamentary study. The ratio is in line with Israel's Arab population, which is about 20%, and is impressive considering Arabs account for just 9% of the total number of university students and about 6% of government employees.

Arab activists say the rising number of Arabs in medical schools over the last two decades has alarmed Israeli officials and led to an effort to restrict enrollment.

For the last six years, most medical school programs have required that applicants be at least 20. School officials say the rule was adopted to ensure a greater maturity among applicants. Critics, however, say it chiefly affects Arabs because most Jewish students begin college after a compulsory two- or three-year stint in the military; most Arabs don't serve in the military.

Rather than wait two years after graduating from high school to begin their studies, many Arab Israeli students opt to enroll in colleges in the West Bank or abroad, or choose a different field of study. (Unlike in the U.S., doctor-training programs in Israel begin at the undergraduate level.)

"The rule has the effect of discouraging Arabs from enrolling in medical schools," said attorney Sawsan Zaher of Adalah, an Israeli group that works against discrimination of Arabs.

Medical school officials dispute that assertion.

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Israel curbing Arab enrollment in medical schools, activists say

May 27, 2012 12:06 am

By Steve Twedt/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The life of a medical researcher can be both rewarding and solitary, with the rewards often coming in breakthrough scientific discoveries made after long hours alone in a laboratory.

Beginning July 1, medical research will be slightly less rewarding -- at least financially -- for faculty at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine.

In a memo sent to department chairs, directors and faculty at the school this spring, the dean, Arthur S. Levine, cited economic conditions as the reason the school will reduce an incentive payment based on researchers' outside grants from 10 percent to 8 percent, while also instituting a $50,000 minimum in outside grant money for researchers to qualify for the incentives.

"As you know, we find ourselves in difficult financial times and need to take such actions as these to maintain operational viability," stated the memo, a copy of which was provided to the Post-Gazette.

The amounts that the researchers will lose will vary widely, since it is a percentage of whatever grants they receive, although Dr. Levine downplayed its significance in a phone interview.

"We're talking about tiny amounts. This isn't going to be a threat to anybody," he said.

The real story, he said, is the larger funding picture and specifically the sluggish national economy that is drying up funding for basic research.

At one time, at least 35 percent of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health were funded, said Dr. Levine, who worked at NIH before coming to Pitt. Currently the grant success rate is 17 percent, and he expects it may fall to 12 percent or 13 percent next year. "We're all victims of the same bad economy."

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Pitt cuts medical research incentive

Three programs at Saskatchewan's only medical school have been accredited, but they did not receive full approval.

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U of S medical programs score provisional accreditation

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Among the graduation ceremonies this weekend was a special one. Two-hundred and sixteen students received their degrees in medicine from UT Health Medical School. And one famous Houstonian was there to see his grandson follow in his footsteps and become a doctor -- legendary heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley.

They are the grandsons of Dr. Cooley, one of the most famous heart surgeons in history, and Peter Kaldis and Charlie Fraser are medical students at UT Health Medical School.

"He's brilliant, he's very witty and he's very fun to be around," said Fraser.

Kaldis remembered how his grandfather's name would often come up in class.

"The surgeon would ask for the 'my scissors' and they'd go in and do a story about these scissors. These are called 'my scissors' because Dr. Cooley would ask for 'my scissors' and he designed these not knowing that I was his grandson," said Kaldis.

And when other med students would find out who they were.

"Most of them say it's pretty cool," said Fraser.

"I remember being little and looking in the Guinness Book of World Records and seeing there's my grandfather's name!" said granddaughter Laura Fraser.

Of the five Cooley children and 16 grandchildren, nine are in the medical field. His daughter, Dr. Weezie Davis, is an ophthalmologist and Peter's mother.

"I'd love to watch him operate, although I would get a little faint and I'd have to sit down from time to time. But he encouraged me, if he hadn't encouraged me to go to medical school I probably wouldn't had enough courage to do it," said Dr. Davis.

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Medical legend present to see his grandson graduate med school

A Caribbean medical school has offered Kern Medical Center 35 million dollars to have its students work at the county hospital, according to The Bakersfield Californian. The paper reports that the students, most of whom are American citizens, will come from Ross University, located on the Caribbean island of Dominica. The contract would span over a 10 year period and would give the students a ...

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Caribbean medical school offers $35M to Kern Medical Center

A few weeks ago, I wrote about creativity. With its emphasis onrequirements and contrived benchmarks of success, medical school admissions might inadvertently be selecting for those who are skilled at jumping through hoops and weeding out more independent thinkers. I received comments from people who were so inspired that they wanted to discuss ideas about reforming the curriculum. Creativity is missing; how are we going to fix this? It was the epitome of irony to me: attempting to standardize the exact thing that refers to thinking outside standardization.

In this post, I hope to address my thinking about the subject in a bit more detail. I believe excessive curriculum mandates are a well-meaning but counterproductive approach to solving what we are aiming to solve.

The temptation to improve education through mandates is not new. Every few years, medical administrators, politicians, or some other Powers That Be decide an important quality that all doctors should have is not being taught, and that it must be standardized into medical education. Focus was first on mastery of the hard sciences, then turned to increased emphasis on compassion and communication. The latest has been a turn to the medical humanities, with endeavors such as visiting art museums and engaging in poetry-writing sessions becoming increasingly widespread. At the end of 2011, 69 of 133 accredited medical schools in the US required a course in the medical humanities.

Medicine is holistic a blend of science and art which those inclined to suggest reform rightly realize involves far more than repairing the human body when it malfunctions. The medical humanities, as a field of study, is invaluable. The question is: should it be required?

Fourth-year medical student Rhys Davies has reservations: Asking students to compare the role of literature in sickness between Broyard and Mantel is pointless unless they want to get something out of it, he writes. In fact, he says, its because he cares so much about the medical humanities (he is completing a thesis in it) that he opposes its obligatory presence in the curriculum. The setup is bad for everyone. Those not interested are miserable, and those who are have a mediocre experience tainted by the heel-dragging of their peers. As Davies puts it, Anything compulsory is duly attended but interest is notably absent.

That is not to say there is no worth in a well-rounded curriculum. There is value in exposing students to diverse ideas and activities, perhaps sparking new passions that never would have been discovered otherwise. There is something to be said for making students do things considered good for them. Mandate nothing, and people might not learn enough. Some need that extra push. They might gripe along the way, but then say after, Im really glad I did that.

But place too much emphasis on curriculum, and the downside is exacerbating a culture of excessive busywork at the expense of some of the most meaningful ways of learning. The knee-jerk desire to reform curriculum whenever a desirable skillset is identified is based on a particular assumption: that every skill is best learned through the medium of coursework. Unfortunately, that assumption just isnt true.

There is a wonderful ethics professor here at Harvard, Dr. Edward Hundert, who has written a lot about the informal curriculum of medical school. A significant transmission of culture happens outside classes, hospital rounds, and the like, he says, over meals or during carpool rides from remote clinical sites. From focus groups with students, he found that the vast majority of the situations the students described as most influential were conversations with no faculty present. He concluded: I have discovered just how little a role the formal ethics curriculum plays in the moral and professional development of our students and residents. We succumb to the mistake of emphasizing teaching, when what we really ought to focus on is learning.

That can occur in many ways. Dr. Faith T. Fitzgerald, former dean of students at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, understands this well. She boldlychallenged a request from politicians that more humanities coursework be added to the medical curriculum, explaining:[I was concerned that] the addition of required courses in literature, drama, sociology, music, and art might actually limit students opportunities to read, go to the theater, be with friends and family, and attend a symphony or museum. Even if they would not have done these things, she continued, the additional coursework would cut down on contemplative time, volunteerism in free clinics, hobbies, and sleep.

Requirements come withan inherent trade-off. With the medical part of medical school demanding enough, free time is a commodity. Soak up our time with mandates aimed to make us well-rounded people, and we have less time to actually do the things, outside the narrow confines of a formalized curriculum, that make us well-rounded people.

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Are medical schools squashing creativity? Part 2: Lighten up on mandates, and take advantage of the informal curriculum