I will make no secret of the fact that I am not a fan of Manchester medical school and I shall attempt to explain why in the following paragraphs. However I don't want this to become a rant, and for this reason I have found it a hard post to write (this is my third attempt at doing so). So I would like to start by acknowledging how lucky I am to have received a medical school education and I realise that there are thousands out there who would give almost anything to do the course that I have just completed. I also accept that there were some things that were great about Manchester. For example, I loved the fact that we were given 10 weeks to produce a piece of clinical research at the end of year 4. I learnt a lot about myself and my future career from this. Also, the online course management system at Manchester (MedLea) is actually pretty good. The techs love to fiddle with it all the time but it works well and provides a great infrastructure around which the course is based. There are other aspects of the Manchester course that I could praise as well, including some fantastic members of staff. I do appreciate my time here, and I'm grateful for the opportunities that I have been afforded.
Right, now I'm going to talk about what I see to be some of the less good aspects of the course. Let's start with a fact. The medical school here is BIG. There are about 450 students in my year and this, in my opinion, is too many. We are split over four teaching hospitals. Three of these hospitals are in Manchester and one is in Preston (about 40 miles away). So we have four groups of students all being taught independently, however they are all under the banner of University of Manchester. It doesn't take a genius to see that there are going to be problems setting equal standards across the board in these cases. Each base hospital approaches things in a slightly different way and therefore there is considerable variation in what each batch of students are taught. Before writing this, I spent some time looking at exam results in each of the sectors and it didn't surprise me to see that the number of students failing the January exempting exam (final exam) was by no means evenly distributed across the four hospital sectors. From this it seems apparent that some students are receiving better teaching/advice than others and that doesn't seem fair to me, especially as all the students applied to the same university.
Another disadvantage of the university being so big is that it seems very impersonal. In St Andrews the staff knew each student by name and genuinely wanted to help us achieve our goals. In Manchester each student is seen merely as a number, another punter passing along the medical school production line. This has a huge impact on student satisfaction. According to last year's National Student Survey, Manchester is the lowest scoring medical school in the country for student satisfaction (61%, the next lowest is 67%). Medical students are like puppies, we like to feel loved, and at Manchester we are just one of the masses. The feeling that you get is one of "so what if you fail, there are plenty more where you came from". I feel that the best way that this problem can be solved is by cutting back on the number of students admitted, and making the medical school more small and personal. Perhaps the Preston students could break away from Manchester and form their own medical school? There is a decent university in Preston and I'm sure they wouldn't say no to a medical course in their prospectus.
This post is already reaching epic proportions so I am going to leave it there for now. I do have more to say though. In part 2 I will write about the teaching and organisation of the course here in Manchester. This will hopefully be up in a few days so check back soon.
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