Letters Dec. 27: Getting into medical school; New Year's resolutions |
There have been many thoughtful letters regarding the idea of having medical school start straight out of high school to shorten training and increase the trained bodies available to the system more quickly.
Unfortunately, we do not have an equitable, well-resourced public education system that would fairly give most potential students the background they need to face the challenges of medical school at the age of 17 or 18.
In some of the U.K.-style systems mentioned, we need to recall that some students are “streamed” early in life to more and less academic pathways, where they tend to stay.
Many Canadian children and youth face societal barriers, inequity of opportunity and other social drivers that can be hard to overcome by the end of high school, let alone set them up to prepare the truly competitive application that today’s medical school application requires.
Getting into medical school is already a complete arms race, with students needing some magical combo of volunteer work, a high-level, skilled hobby, leadership experience, exceptional, near-perfect marks, and maybe a flavour of just enough adversity to make one seem worldly, and yet still ready to work to 150% capacity.
There is little room for variation in one’s path of perfection, and no wonder that so many medical students now require training accommodations and wellness support to navigate a demanding training system with long hours and high academic burden, working daily with increasing social complexity inside a collapsing, desperate system.
Shifting this application journey back to even younger students would be cognitively disastrous, and the race would start at age 13 or 14.
Our 17-year-olds are already some of the most anxious, unhappy, struggling groups seen in decades; those who are less affluent with social adversity may find medical school impossible to even consider so young.
We may need more bodies, but let’s preserve the doctors we have, make it possible to work later in one’s career without ongoing 60-hour-plus work weeks, provide intake workers, navigators, social work, nurse practitioners and other physician extenders and teams.
Let’s work on system solutions, not just the one solution of more bodies from more medical........