Continued from part one, here.

Gone are the days of stringent oral examinations where a board decided whether you were worthy of the title ‘Doctor’ based on your clinical performance and your basic medical knowledge. It’s been replaced by right-or-not MCQs that don’t take marks away for wrong answers (which is what happens in real life) and which offer no feedback, so you don’t even know which questions you got wrong.

You get a letter grade, which isn’t even reflected in your degree. How fair is it for a C student and an A student to be propelled into the public without distinction when the difference in quality of care will be considerable?

I won’t allow for people who are “bad at exams” because, let’s face  it, all of medicine is an exam. Every patient is a test, and you either pass or fail. If you can’t handle the pressure in medical school, you sure as hell won’t be able to handle it when a patient is coding in the middle of A&E and you’re the intern or, God forbid, the senior resident on call.

A tighter hold needs to be kept on the keys to the medical profession.

Please don’t feel like I’m elevating medicine to some pedestal. For one thing, it’s already on a pedestal. For another, every profession should demand high standards of their workers. It’s only unrealistic to expect that to happen because then all the substandard people would just be living on the streets.

Standards are there for a reason, and they ought to be upheld. I don’t like the wishy-washy mass-produced MDs that are currently flooding the market, but until the powers-that-be are backed up against the wall and held accountable we probably won’t have any kind of change in medical school output.

At the end of the day, don’t we all want (to be) good doctors?