NUIG study finds 9 in 10 medical students may leave Ireland on qualifying

Pishoy Gouda, a final year medical student at NUI Galway, was the principal investigator of this study.

Nine out of 10 medical students plan to leave or are “contemplating” leaving Ireland when they qualify, a new study involving the State’s six training schools has found.

Read article here:  Ireland's medical brain drain: migration intentions of Irish medical students

Career opportunities, working conditions and lifestyle are cited as the top three factors for migration by some 88 per cent of over 2,000 students surveyed.

The study led by NUI Galway (NUIG) and published on Thursday has found pay was not a key issue among the respondents.

The Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association had said highly trained doctors are being “driven out”.

The study’s supervisor, NUIG senior lecturer in social and preventive medicine Dr Diarmuid O’Donovan, has called for action to retain medical graduates and attract back those who have already emigrated.

Staff at HSE West’s public health department and at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University of Limerick, University College Cork, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin were involved with NUIG in the study, published in the open access journal Human Resources for Health.

  

Some 1,519 of the 2,000-plus medical students surveyed were Irish, and some 85 per cent of the total identified career opportunities as a determining factor in going abroad. Some 83 per cent identified working conditions, and 80 per cent identified lifestyle as factors.

Some 34.3 per cent said they were “definitely” planning to migrate, and a further 53.3 per cent said they were contemplating it – a total of almost 88 per cent.

Final-year NUIG medical student Pishoy Gouda, the principal investigator, said previous studies on this theme had focused on graduates, whereas this analysis involved junior, intermediate and senior students in the six medical schools.

“We found the outcome alarming, as it shows that even pre-med and first-year students are thinking about leaving already,” he said. It reflected a “widespread culture of intention to migrate” in the medical schools.

view full article on Irish Times here

Ministers to discuss concerns over medical students’ loans

Concern about the high cost of loan repayments for graduate- entry medical students will be discussed by ministers in advance of the budget.

Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan said she would raise the issue amid lobbying from affected students for a loan relief scheme that would allow them to get tax relief on repayments for the cost of their education.

The issue was raised by Senator Marie Louise O’Donnell at an Oireachtas committee last week, at which she accused the banks of “immoral” and “disgraceful” behaviour by hiking up interest rates on loans after medical students graduate.

The practice was forcing young medics to emigrate as “some are paying back double what they borrowed”, with loans typically exceeding €100,000 with interest. She said graduates were “financially completely choked by the banks” and the Government should exert more pressure on institutions it had bailed out.

Brian Doyle, a final year graduate entry medical (Gem) student at UCC, who is part of a new campaign group on the issue, said the absence of affordable finance for education was hindering access for students from lower socio-economic means.

“This is not about more money for doctors,” Mr Doyle said. “It’s about making it possible for people to repay loans which they need to take out to fund their education.”

A recent survey showed that more than 60 per cent of Gem students take out loans of €60,000 to €100,000. The interest rate switches from a lower fixed rate to a higher variable rate on graduation, making it more difficult to clear the debt.

In the case of some existing loans, the increase is from about 4 per cent to as much as 9 per cent.

View article here

Journal of Medical Students, Galway

The Journal of Medical Students, Galway (JMSG) is a new student-staff led initiative, launched in the winter of 2014 by medical students at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in collaboration with the Clinical Sciences Institute and Explore Initiative.

The JMSG seeks to exhibit a broad range of original work from the basic sciences, translational, clinical and surgical disciplines of medicine.

Volume 1, issue 1 available Spring 2014 

Website is www.jmsgalway.com

Frequency: annual (every spring)

Availability: online (via www.jmsgalway.com) and in hardcopy at Clinical Sciences Institute, CSI library, and medical academies.

Aid to Professionalism

Professionalism is a challenging endeavour for Medical Students.
An aid to support the journey to Professionalism is provided by -
Professionalism in Medicine (Spandorfer et al) which is located at
610.69 PRO
This is a Case-Based Guide for Medical Students -

                                   

VSA - Voluntary Sevices Abroad, NUI Galway

 

 Voluntary Services Abroad is a medical aid charity run by the 4th year medical students of NUI, Galway. Founded in 1977 by Dr. Dom Colbert, it sends groups of student volunteers to the developing world each summer.

Since its foundation, more than 400 NUIG medical students have been sent overseas as healthcare volunteers, bringing with them funds to develop and support healthcare delivery in the areas they are working. These places have included areas of Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Peru, Ecuador, Belize, Vietnam and India.

NUI Galway Medical Graduates Deliver Intern-led Teaching programme to Final Medical Students

The final year of NUI Galway’s undergraduate medical curriculum has been enhanced by an intern teaching programme, which has been developed and delivered in first semester of the current academic year.

Newly graduated medical doctors teach NUI Galway’s final year medical students and simultaneously act as mentors and role models. This is achieved ‘by on the ward training’ whereby medical interns teach groups of five medical students and take them through the assessment of common patient presentations they encounter, covering history-taking, examination, clinical reasoning and management skills essential to becoming a competent doctor. Teaching takes place at the bedside, in a clinical context.

There are plans to continue this Intern-led Teaching Programme into semester two when those students who have been in the Medical Academies in semester one return to Galway. The final medical students will themselves be graduating in June 2014, and it is anticipated that many of them, having experienced the benefit of the Intern-led Teaching Programme, will volunteer their time and skills to teach and thus continue this valuable teaching programme.

View full article here

12 NUI Galway Medical Students to be Given Opportunity to Train in Developing Countries

(l-r)Paul Jackson, CEO and Sharon Phelan of the Hospital Saturday Fund, Dr Diarmuid O’Donovan, NUI Galway and (left to right standing) medical students Esraa Hegazy, Susan Morrison and Suzanne Smyth.

Students of medicine will have new opportunities to spend two months in a developing country with funding made available by The Hospital Saturday Fund. The School of Medicine working with the Galway University Foundation will invite fourth year students of medicine to apply for funding for the medical electives, which will be offered in the summer of 2014.

A medical elective is a period of supervised learning, chosen by the student.  In this case the work will be in a resource poor setting which has many recognised benefits for students: to experience clinical practice and health care in different cultural and organisational settings and to learn about diseases and conditions that are not often seen at home.

Senior Lecturer in Social and Preventative Medicine Dr Diarmuid O’Donovan welcomed the support of The Hospital Saturday Fund and said “these electives help to improve the ability of students to manage patients from diverse backgrounds and to better understand global health. Many electives are based in low-resource tropical settings where the organisation and provision of healthcare, and the social, cultural, economic and political environments are very different from what students have experienced in their home institutions.”

View full article here