More caring attitude towards students is needed

Editor - My first year at medical school has been primarily a positive experience. On reflection however, it seems to me that certain aspects of the process of adjusting to the course were made unnecessarily difficult. For example, I was expected to arrive at classes variously located in hospitals and university buildings around the city of Belfast without so much as a map or a signpost. It was also assumed that I would be able to produce essays researched using peer reviewed journals, having had only a woefully inadequate introduction to medical databases.

This left me looking for the library in a teaching building when it was actually situated in a hospital. Names listed in our study guides as potential sources of guidance meant nothing to me, and I have yet to establish the identities of my “year representatives.” With the advantages of friends in second year and a foreknowledge of the layout of major hospital sites stemming from prior personal admissions, I managed to arrive at most of my lectures and to submit work of an adequate standard. I could name others who did not and are no longer on the course.

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My hopes for an easier ride ahead have not been boosted by conversations with students currently expecting to enter their third year in August. It seems that it is only by asking older students that they have been able to establish the structure of the clinical course on which they will be embarking, as they have received no information from the university, with only weeks remaining until the new semester begins. Surely in an educational establishment with the ostensible aim of producing caring health professionals it would be judicious for the staff to set an appropriate example by showing a more caring attitude towards their students and making their passage from matriculation to graduation a little less painful?