“IS THIS country rip-roaring mad?” writes Dr David Roberts, a Northamptonshire GP, in Doctor (Feb 8).
What’s got his goat? Practice-based commissioning (PBC), payment by results (PbR) or another money-based acronym? No, it’s the decision by the Peninsula Medical School in Devon and Cornwall to invite the public to help to design its undergraduate medical curriculum.
“Surely the objective cannot be to ask Mrs Bloggs to add politically correct sociological garbage to an already overfull syllabus?” he asks. “I don’t want to be too hard on the medical school,” he says, “but plumbers, lawyers and airline pilots are also ‘of a community’ and the public is rarely invited to contribute to their curriculums. And a damn good job, too.”
The medical school’s crime is to announce that it wants to develop an undergraduate medical course “accountable to the local community”.
It is an idea that Dr Maree O’Keefe, paediatrician and visiting academic at the medical school, defends.
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She says: “Most medical schools are publicly funded institutions with a mission to educate doctors to care for the community. The doctors graduating should provide care that the community both needs and wants, but schools have never been held accountable to communities.
“The doctor-patient relationship is shifting, with patients encouraged to take more responsibility for their health. Patient contributions to discussions on curriculum priorities should be a natural consequence of these changes.”
She says that Peninsula “is one of a number of centres researching ways to obtain and integrate community perspectives into the process of medical school curriculum development”.