Medical students outline problems
Medical students at the University of Saskatchewan have asked the college of medicine to make immediate changes to fix problems with the way the province’s future doctors are educated.
Weeks without clinical instruction, not enough doctors willing to have students tag along when seeing patients, missing lecture notes and hastily cancelled lectures that weren’t rescheduled are some of the problems Student Medical Society of Saskatchewan president Kylie Riou lists in a letter penned to the college.
“Students are worried their education will not have adequately equipped them with the tools to be competent physicians,” Riou writes in the letter, which the society presented to the college’s administration and faculty council last week.
The college is undergoing a restructuring — one that has proved to be controversial as some professors protested a lack of consultation and claimed the proposal alienated some doctors.
The university says the college needs an organizational overhaul to boost its research activity and satisfy accrediting bodies, which put the school on a warning of probation earlier this year.
“I think everything I wrote just speaks to how much we need this college restructuring right now,” said Riou, a second-year-medical student. “A lot of it is organization and accountability and lack of communication.”
Although medical students have expressed worry about the quality of their program for years, Riou says several factors, including the restructuring process, “have caused undergraduate medical education to decrease in priority.”
The structural changes to the college will not come quickly enough to help current students, Riou writes. As the government expands the number of training seats in the province’s only medical school, Riou wonders how the college will find enough doctors willing to teach them if it’s struggling to keep up now.
Acting dean of medicine Lou Qualtiere says he was troubled to hear about the problems, which he described as “unprofessional” and “inappropriate” behaviour by some faculty.
Unplanned interruptions crop up from time to time — physicians may get tied up with a patient or be ill themselves — but the frequency of problems has grown and is unacceptable, he said.
“I promised (students) that I would not allow this (restructuring process) to affect their undergraduate education. The disconcerting thing about this is, I haven’t been able to stop it,” Qualtiere said. “In fact, what’s occurring is at a much higher frequency than we’ve ever seen before.”
Missing an occasional lesson is understandable, but it’s incumbent upon teachers to reschedule quickly, he said.
Qualtiere has called a special meeting with all medical department heads and will ask they report back to him within a month on “how this is not going to occur next term.”
The departments must reschedule and deliver all the missed lessons, even if it strains student schedules, Qualtiere said.
“We’ve got a lot of problems in a lot of other areas, but if we cannot produce a strong undergraduate medical training program, this college doesn’t need to exist,” Qualtiere said. “It’s got to be our primary existence ... I will be doing everything in my power to hold everyone accountable. If I fail at this, then they should remove me.”
Riou says she has been pleased with the college’s response and says students are hopeful the situation will improve.