Too many doctors in the house
By Debra Jopson
May 7, 2005
IN ANATOMY lessons, they look at, but do not dissect, bodies. If they cannot make it to lectures early, they have to file into a second lecture theatre, where a video link feeds the lecturer's words to them. "We had labs last year meant to be for 12 students and we had 60. You had people crowding around trying to see a chemical reaction," said Gemma Winlo, a second-year medical student at Sydney University.
In the hospitals, the groups of medical students following consultants around has swelled, sometimes to eight. "It's not nice for the patient, having … students coming in a big mob into a little cubicle," she said.
This is life for first- and second-year students in the university's hard-pressed medical faculty, which took in 274 new students this year, and 252 last year, under the Federal Government's scheme to boost doctor numbers.
"Getting into medicine is such a difficult process. Once you're here it's a bit of a shock to find the system can't handle you," said Winlo.
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Eight years ago, the intake was 117, of whom 12 were international students. Despite the "bulge", HECS places have dropped in the past two years. This year, there are 59 new international, and 15 domestic, fee-payers. International students pay about $150,000 for a four-year postgraduate degree.
Dror Maor, the president of the Australian Medical Students Association, of which Winlo is a council member, said the pressure of numbers was a nationwide problem. "The Government said, 'We need all these new doctors. Let's have new medical students.' Now we have more, but not the funding and the infrastructure."
Sydney University's dean of medicine, Andrew Coats, said there would be "short-term pain while we try and crank up". Eighteen new staff had been appointed and some learning rooms had been expanded, but it would take time to set up new lecture theatres and student accommodation, and to increase hospital capacity.
His faculty, with an annual turnover of $170 million, was used to finding extra funding because government grants to the university had dropped to below 20 per cent of total funding in the past seven years. The true cost of funding each medical student was $250,000 a year. The Federal Government gave the faculty $15,500 a student each year - plus $8500 in HECS fees if it was not paid up front, he said.
Phil Huang, a third-year student, said that in Britain he saw pathology labs with one tutor to three students. Here, students had to find many answers to practical questions in their textbooks. "You have 60 people packed into a room. You're trying to see. You're trying to learn off slides. You're trying to learn off one person at the front. It's really hard to get that information."
He had paid $1000 to do an anatomy course in his own time. "It's not the university's fault. We all love where we are. But we can't deny that things are slipping a little bit and the Federal Government is not doing very much."
Professor Coats said dissection had been dropped because it was a 19th-century way of learning, and streamlining the curriculum meant "that some of the detailed surgical anatomy can't be given to everyone in their medical student years".
