The Journal

Today arrived my copy of the studentBMJ. This delightful publication is full of articles designed to be of interest to medical students in the UK. You'd think that obvious from the title "British Medical Journal." However, all is not as it seems.

What frustrates me is that the studentBMJ doesn't just publish articles from UK students and doctors and academics(...) but they publish things from all over the world. This is fine until you read some of the crap that they have the cheek to publish.

Take two issues ago, for example. There was a letter from some Polish students proclaiming how we should "Sponsor a Polish medical student". The article continued...

"Although medical education in Poland is free, students still struggle to fund their studies and many of them drop out..."

Sound familiar? You could be forgiven for thinking that Poland is a typo which was originally supposed to read British (apart from the free part). I'm not for one second suggesting that people in Poland have it as good as we do in the UK; I appreciate that it's far from it. However, to publish such a letter in a publication primarily aimed for a UK audience, an audience themselves struggling to fund themselves through medical education, is simply absurd. Students in the UK are in record amounts of debt, have to pay ridiculous tuition fees and it is true that many will drop out because of this.

To take a slightly different angle, just look at the university recruitment rates for 2006/2007. For the first time in 100 years (slight exaggeration, but you get the point) applications via UCAS have dropped by around 3%. Normally they rise by quite a lot. I'm sure that there's some kind of rational explanation for this other than the fact that from 2006/2007 students are charged £3000 a year tuition feed? No? Oh.

The Poland article annoyed me. But not as much as the attached studentBMA news did. This is normally a good read, you're kept up to date with things that are happening and is genuinely interesting. However, there was one small sentence that bugged me. The sentence mentioned how medical students are struggling to develop their practical skills because of "competition from other health care students". Good point, but...

What? Does that mean nurses? Physios? OTs? The article stopped there. I want to hear more about how and why nurses and other health care students are being trained to do my future job. It seems nobody has the guts to speak out about this.

One of the questions I was asked at all three of my medical school interviews was "Why do you want to be a doctor and not a nurse?". Well, my answer was simple. You get to spend the day making life-or-death decisions about people's lives rather than wiping shitty arses all day and cleaning up vomit.

Why was I not told that if I got a nursing degree I could become a doctor? Then I would be finished and working next July, with less than half of the debt that i'm going to have, AND with a nice NHS bursary every month.

I'm confused and disillusioned.