Rumbles in the Medical Schools?

Abstract

I note disquiet among those who teach in the regions medical schools. Two recent articles in this journal report their unresponsiveness to the needs of the students and, even more importantly, to the needs of the populace who look towards them to provide the medical services the region sorely needs. The issue of this journal dated December 2004 has articles on the subject by Kakande¹ and Kigonya² who both railed against declining educational standards. Kigonya noted ‘a decline in the standards of medical education in Uganda’, and that ‘a significant number of house officers who are deficient in basic clinical skills, of taking a focused history and making a physical examination’; Kakande¹ suggested that the region’s medical schools had to give renewed emphasis to ‘teaching and patient care’ and that the teacher ‘must return to the bedside for teaching medical students’. They both asserted, quite properly, that the primary role of the region’s medical schools, is to produce doctors competent in dealing with the common pathology of the region and that this was being threatened by the unresponsive bureaucracy of the universities. They criticized two developments which had significantly contributed to the decline; the growing tendency of the medical schools to appoint and give promotion and tenure to those clinical teachers who were research-orientated rather than those committed to teaching and, secondly, their tendency to impose new curricula, imported usually from the West, which lacked relevance to the countries’ needs.