McGill’s medical school on probation
MONTREAL • When McGill medical students were called upon last year to contribute to the regular accreditation process of their school, they faced a tough choice.
“We had this very frank discussion among the student body,” said Nebras Warsi, a second-year student who just finished his term as president of the Medical Students’ Society. “Do we want to sort of obscure things and not be honest and just say everything’s great and be happy with it? Or do we want to just be honest and be very meticulous in everything we look at?”
They opted for honesty, and in part because of that, their school has been put on probation by Canadian accreditation authorities for the first time in its 186-year history.
David Eidelman, dean of the faculty, told the Montreal Gazette the probation is a “black eye” for the prestigious school. Students are now wondering whether their future patients will look askance at the McGill degree on the office wall.
“We don’t want people to start feeling as if there is some inherent loss of value to a McGill degree, because the truth is there isn’t,” Warsi said.
The Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools advised McGill Principal Suzanne Fortier on Monday that the medical school was being placed on probation after it failed to comply with 24 of the 132 standards measured. Shortcomings were identified for another eight standards.
“The breadth and the depth of these findings have seriously compromised the quality of the medical education program,” the committee wrote to Fortier.
McGill joins four other North American medical schools on probation out of a total of 161, according to a list compiled by the U.S. body responsible for accreditation, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. The only other Canadian school on the list is the University of Saskatchewan.
Many of the deficiencies concerned administrative issues, but some touched the classroom and in-hospital training of students.
The accreditors found that McGill students reported inadequate instruction in women’s health and family and domestic violence. Many students doing surgery rotations in teaching hospitals reported being unable to reach residents or staff when needed “for a variety of acute patient care issues.”
During hospital rotations, students in most fields frequently worked longer than the hours specified in the school’s workload policy. Students said they were reluctant to report mistreatment from physicians “due to fear of reprisals.”
Doulia Hamad, the current president of the Medical Students’ Society, said the problems are not unique to McGill. “In the medical field, a lot of the time you’re put in situations that are very difficult to deal with as a student, and a lot of the time people you report to are also the people who evaluate you,” she said.
She is confident the school will address the issues before its next accreditation visit in 2017. “It’s a wake-up call, and it’s really a big driver for us to correct things very rapidly,” she said.
In a message to students and faculty, Eidelman said the school was “not entirely surprised” by the accreditors’ conclusion. The fact that McGill is introducing a new medical curriculum and opened a new teaching hospital this year complicated things.
The medical school has “approximately 18 to 24 months to demonstrate significant progress on the items identified by the ... accreditors,” Eidelman said. He said the majority of the issues will be addressed before the end of this year.
Warsi said the probation may lead a few applicants to choose other schools over McGill, but he does not foresee much impact on enrolment at a school consistently ranked among the best in Canada. It accepts 185 students a year out of 3,000 applicants from around the world.
“I’m sure that for the next little while there will be some sort of feeling of loss of prestige, but I think that will go away really quickly once the news settles in and once we have our second (accreditation) visit in 2017,” he said. “I’m confident we will meet and exceed standards.”