This is good news. Virtually no one aside from the college wanted this change. Medical education is long enough and we don’t need more barriers to becoming family physicians. In the wild old days of GPs you could practice after just a year of internship.
I think there is some value in that general practitioners need to know a little bit about a very broad spectrum of things and some new practitioners feel overwhelmed at the start of their practice, but I agree, it’s incredibly bad timing, and shouldn’t be done without some other adjustment to offset the increase in training time.
Like, we know standardized tests are poor at predicting future performance as a physician, and interviews can introduce a plethora of biases unless they’re very deliberately structured, yet we still use both of these as major checkpoints of medical school admission. And they’re not just a historical lingering standard, the University of Saskatchewan only implemented the requirements for a four-year undergraduate degree and the MCAT for med school admission in 2013. Anecdotally, the few physicians who got in without an undergraduate before the change was implemented in my wife’s class ended up being top of their class.
This is good news. Virtually no one aside from the college wanted this change. Medical education is long enough and we don’t need more barriers to becoming family physicians. In the wild old days of GPs you could practice after just a year of internship.
I think there is some value in that general practitioners need to know a little bit about a very broad spectrum of things and some new practitioners feel overwhelmed at the start of their practice, but I agree, it’s incredibly bad timing, and shouldn’t be done without some other adjustment to offset the increase in training time.
Like, we know standardized tests are poor at predicting future performance as a physician, and interviews can introduce a plethora of biases unless they’re very deliberately structured, yet we still use both of these as major checkpoints of medical school admission. And they’re not just a historical lingering standard, the University of Saskatchewan only implemented the requirements for a four-year undergraduate degree and the MCAT for med school admission in 2013. Anecdotally, the few physicians who got in without an undergraduate before the change was implemented in my wife’s class ended up being top of their class.