Student soapbox: Bad feeling about medical school mergers
Navin Chohan can see the advantages, but prejudice still exists
SBRLHSMDQMW. That's the abbreviation of my medical school's name. It
stands for "Saint Bartholomew's and
the Royal London Hospitals Schools of
Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary and
Westfield College" - quite a mouthful, and
that's not even with the "of the University
of London" on the end of it.
In the early 1990s the right honourable
ladies and gentlemen who were then in
power ordered that the many London
based medical schools should be merged
with each other and absorbed by the big
University of London colleges. The purpose was to consolidate medical teaching
resources and to create four large centres
of medical education in London. The result
of this is the beast of a name that my college now sports.
As a sixth former I actually applied to the
Royal London Hospital Medical School,
through the UCAS scheme, to study course
M200, otherwise known as medicine. Many
of my fellow students applied to Saint
Bartholomew's Hospital, and the fact that
we were all brought together came as a bit
of a surprise as none of us was aware of the
merger going on. It came as even more of
a surprise to most of us to find that we were
in fact students of Queen Mary and Westfield College. The problem was that it wasn't really a pleasant surprise.
I personally have little problem with merging with Queen Mary and Westfield. I relish
the opportunity to meet and spend time with
a mix of students reading for various degrees.
But then, the Royal London was the only
separate medical school I applied to through
UCAS - all the others were faculties of larger universities. I had inadvertently stumbled
into the situation I had originally wanted. Or
so I thought.
Both the medical schools have long histories and many traditions of which they are
hugely proud. For them, absorption by a
larger college would stifle this and result in
a loss of autonomy. Forget the fact that the
cash they got from the merger was much
needed and welcomed or that they were
inefficient and lumbering before the merger. I liken the now combined medical school
to a mighty beast, an elephant.
The elephant, like Saint Bartholomew's
and the Royal London, is a large and magnificent creature with some especially glorious features (ears, trunk/scientific
achievement, history) but it becomes lumbering and slow in its old age.
The merger officially took place in 1995,
and, since then, some of the bad feeling
has boiled over. Issues with Saint
Bartholomew's and the Royal London
being joined are no longer in the air.
Becoming a faculty of Queen Mary and
Westfield, however, is still a problem for
many.
Stuck in tradition and history
I know little of the official lines and the
opinions of the staff, but I can speak of the
student bodies. Since the discovery, back in
1997, that we were now Queen Mary and
Westfield students I have known medics to
hate the parent college and its occupants.
You would imagine that such distrust
would have worn off by now but, alas, it has
not.I have heard apochryphal stories of
money being taken from the medical
schools to fund other projects at the college. I have witnessed the downright rude
behaviour of medics asking students of
other faculties if they studied "basket weaving" at the "blatantly red brick" QMP
(Queen Mary Polytechnic to those unaware
of this "witticism"). This is, sadly, a pervasive attitude, and the reason that it hasn't
worn off is that generations of medics pass
it down to the following years.
To me it's a shame that these people
don't see the many benefits that Queen
Mary and Westfield has given us, rather
than exaggerating the very few negatives.
As part of Queen Mary and Westfield we
have a much bigger student voice and
more economic power. The college has
many links, and we are now able to use
them.
To cap it all, Queen Mary and Westfield
is funding the redevelopment of the
decrepit and old buildings that make up
the medical school sites. In exchange, they
have not taken anything too important
from us.
I feel that the combined medical school
is very stuck in tradition and history. It
looks through rose tinted spectacles at its
heyday and is only gradually realising that
it must clear its vision to prepare for the
future. But I have to give the school the
benefit of the doubt. After all, an elephant
never forgets.
Navin Chohan, final year medical student, Queen Mary and Westfield Medical School, London
Email: ha5335@qmw.ac.uk
studentBMJ 2000;08:259-302 August ISSN 0966-6494
