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Irish medical education has been undergoing significant changes in recent years. The changes have been driven by the Medical Council, the statutory body set up to oversee the profession in Ireland. Over the past couple of years, the council has reviewed every medical school in the State - UCD, TCD, UCC, NUI Galway and the RCSI - and has made recomendations for change. In the past medical education had suffered from "factual overloading and had not encouraged students to become mature adults." The new programmes are designed to enable students to enter the era of life-long learning.
The council has proposed thata new integrated si-year programme, which would incorporate the intern year (training in hospitals) should become the standard undergradute course. Already, UCC is phasing out its six-year course and other medical schools in the Republic are reviewing first year medicine, often called the pre-med year. The year is largely science-based and its phasing out is a recognition that physics, chemistry and biology are taught to a sufficiently high level in schools and that there is no need to repeat them.
The British Medical Association (BMA) wants up to 1000 new places in British medical schools. There huge shortages of GPs and specialists. This will mean the creation of at least one medical school. Irish students could benefit.
Veterinary medicine
UCD is the only college in the Republic to offer veterinary medicine. There are 65 first-year places available to Irish applicants, and last year's cut-off points were 545 (random selection applied).
Prof. Michael Monaghan, Dean of Veterinary Medicine at UCD, says it is very important that secondary school students get extensive work experience in a veterinary practice before they apply for a place on the five-year veterinary course.
"Students should have a clear idea of the kind of work they are doing and what kind of hours are involved. After all, animals get sick after working hours. There's a lot of routine work involved. It's not all high excitement and one crisis after another, as you would think from some TV programmes," says Prof. Monaghan.
Students make "a very significant commitment" to working voluntarily in private practice during the summer holidays in their last three years in college, and have to put in 22 weeks practical experience over that period. They will spend a couple of weeks on a farm early in their first year.
Veterinary students study everything from animal anatomy and surgery on animals to husbandry and the agents that cause disease.
In Ireland, there are about 2,000 registered vets. Some 300 to 400 of those work for the Department of Agriculture on the control of diseases such as TB, brucellosis and foot-and-mouth disease.
