53 med students won’t graduate

Kiwi medical students skipping overseas work experience for holidays has been a ‘‘wake-up call’’ for the profession.

And final-year students who swapped compulsory threemonth hospital placements overseas for holidays are ‘‘heartbroken’’. Fifty-three trainee interns from three Otago University campuses have been found to have submitted false work experience records.

Otago Medical School Dean Barry Taylor said rumours of the fake placements emerged at the Christchurch campus in June/ July. That prompted a ‘‘low level investigation to try to find if there was enough here to actually move to an investigation of academic misconduct’’.

Some of the information came from the offending students, who posted pictures of themselves on holiday, and ‘‘it became obvious they were certainly not where they were supposed to be’’.

The scam involved students falsifying documents for their elective placements. Initially 15 students were identified when the investigation results were released on November 4.

But the investigation widened to include the Dunedin and Wellington campuses, with students asked about the accuracy of their elective reports.

‘‘This is extremely disappointing to the medical school, and to me personally,’’ Taylor said of the one in five final year students found to have not met acceptable attendance requirements.

All of those affected students had job offers from DHBs, Taylor said. ‘‘The students have been quite seriously affected by the investigation, the majority have seen themselves as really honest people doing medicine for the sake of other people.’’

Taylor said it was ‘‘a bad way to start’’ a budding medical career. ‘‘Many of them are heartbroken.’’ He did not believe academic staff had knowledge of how much time had been taken off.

Medical students have been falsifying their placement documents to go on extensive holidays.

Stuff reported interns chose specific medical centres in Belize, Bosnia and Italy, where they could get their placement signed off – sometimes for cash – after only a week or less.

Taylor would only confirm Eastern Europe as one of the destinations. It was at these posts where students, instead of gaining overseas experience and providing vital medical support to communities, went on holiday.

‘‘I think this is actually a wake-up call to the whole profession, and indeed other professions, where similar things are likely to happen.’’

Taylor acknowledged the ‘‘systems’’ in place for elective placements had allowed for the dishonesty to occur.

A ‘‘package of consequences’’ for the 53 students will include:

■ Students not being able to graduate with the rest of their class in December.

■ Paying back the grant funding for each week of holiday they took instead of attending their placements.

■ Writing a self-reflective essay and a package of community service or research.

■ Automatic referral to the Fitness to Practise Committee.

The remaining 194 students who met attendance requirements will graduate in December.

Auckland University said, in light of recent events, it had commissioned an external review of its own programme but it was not aware of any of its students falsifying medical electives.

Otago University ViceChancellor Harlene Hayne said a ‘‘broad and detailed’’ inquiry would look how the misconduct occurred and could be prevented.