How can we ensure student doctors are fit for the future?

How can we ensure medical students are fit for the future?

The information medical students need to learn is vast and curriculum overload has been an issue since medicine was first taught. There have been huge advances in diagnostics, imaging, and therapeutics, which has been accelerated in some areas with the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Simulation and virtual reality are becoming the norm in medical education, giving students the opportunity to practice essential clinical skills in a safe and simulated environment.

Furthermore, medicine is rapidly transforming, we have an increase in technological advances, planetary health challenges as well as varying needs of different demographic groups.

Clinicians need to be flexible and adaptable in their approach to medicine. Medical students must be taught to deal with the unexpected, having the ability to make decisions when things aren’t necessarily following a pattern. Moreover, students must have the underlying knowledge, skills, and abilities to make these difficult decisions.

How can medical educators ensure students’ success?

Firstly, the selection of medical students is extremely important. Medical schools require high level academic entry requirements. In addition, those in the admissions process need to be looking for interpersonal skills and the potential for developing such skills.

Secondly, in order to ensure student doctors are ready for the future, clear and well-defined graduate outcomes must be set. These should be regularly reviewed and, if necessary, changed to accommodate the advances, developments and challenges that are happening in healthcare. It is important to take a step back and consider the core concepts to medicine, so as not to give students curriculum overload.

Lastly, it is important to consider that doctors are in lifelong training and medical school is only the beginning of clinical education. Being a medical student is not about becoming a specialist in orthopaedic surgery, for example, rather, learning about what orthopaedics can offer, what the speciality is like in the broadest sense and what generic skills can be learnt by spending time with an orthopaedic specialist.

By identifying the core concepts of a medical curriculum, this allows general themes such as a clinical communication skills, public health, and medical law and ethics to be woven into the curriculum in a spiral pattern, as these topics are revisited throughout the course.

Moreover, the electives module gives students an opportunity to practice research or gain work experience in a speciality which interests them, giving them options to think about the type of doctor they want to be.

Conclusion

Healthcare delivery is rapidly transforming, along with the way in which we teach it. Clinicians need to remain flexible in their approach to patient care and have the ability to make decisions rapidly when diagnoses aren’t following a set pattern. Central to this, is identifying individuals who could develop such interpersonal skills and giving student doctors the knowledge and abilities to make these decisions.

A core curriculum should be identified, with the absolute minimum framework that student doctors need to learn so as not to overload them. Once this has been identified, general themes such as public health can be touched on throughout the course in a spiral fashion. Clear graduate outcomes need to be set in relation to the curriculum, which should be regularly reviewed in order to account for the advances in medicine. Lastly, it is crucial to remember that this is the first stage of clinical training and is not about training doctors to become a certain speciality, but rather to expose them to a range of specialities and research interests.

If readers are interested in learning more about how to structure the core curriculum for medical students or about the challenges facing medical professionals, tune into our first podcast episode with Dr Diana Wood (please see: https://www.cumeg.cam.ac.uk/podcast/series-overview/). Additionally, CUMEG provides bespoke support and advice for creating or enriching medical curriculums, so please do get in contact if you want to know more at: info@cumeg.cam.ac.uk.