Melomed trains Maties medics

AS TYGERBERG patients get tired of large groups of medical students examining them, Stellenbosch University has signed a new partnership with a private hospital group to train future doctors.

Some Maties medical students in their fourth and fifth years will now be rotating through practical training at Melomed Gatesville, partly in order to ease the burden on Tygerberg Hospital.

Yesterday, the university and Melomed signed an agreement for the training programme to officially begin. If it goes well, students will be placed at other Melomed hospitals too.

Hospital manager Henry Hendricks said despite their busy schedules, Melomed specialists had embraced the opportunity to teach medical students.

Professor Rafique Moosa, head of the Department of Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University, said training at Melomed will make the students well-rounded doctors when they graduate.

“Being a tertiary hospital, the kind of cases we get at Tygerberg are complicated, whereas here, the patients come with the kind of everyday disease profile that the students are more likely to see when they go into practice,” Moosa said.

“Another advantage is because the groups are very small here, they get one-on-one teaching, which we can’t provide at Tygerberg.”

Doctor Zaraina Solomons is in charge of training the students at Melomed, and prioritises clinical skills.

Solomons said that patients at Tygerberg often got fed up with groups of students wanting to physically examine them.

“At Tygerberg the congestion is intense. The groups that are doing their clinical rotations are getting larger. Often if patients are getting examined multiple times, by different students, the patients actually start refusing,” Solomons said.

Aliya Gani is a fifth-year medical student who has completed her four-week rotation at Melomed Gatesville, with some classmates. When they first entered the hospital, the students expected the private healthcare patients to refuse them access for physical examinations. They were wrong.

“The attitude we got from most people was that this will contribute to our learning and becoming a better doctor in the future, so I’m willing to help where I can,” Gani said.

“The problem with Tygerberg is that there’s not so much one-on-one time with a doctor or consultant who can teach or mentor you,” Gani said.

“Here, they actively take time out of their schedules to help us, do bedside teaching and go through cases with us. It’s a mentoring type of relationship which we haven’t had before.

“There are certain things that you can’t learn from a textbook, so that’s been very valuable,” Gani said.

STUDENTS from Stellenbosch University to train at Melomed Gatesville, in white coats, Aliya Gani, Ayesha Korowlay and Athar Harneker, with Dr Zaraina Solomons.