Medical students welcome Barts deal, but want to know more

An agreement between the University of Malta and the government on the placing of medical students has been hailed as a step in the right direction by student faculty representatives.

But the student representatives have advised caution over what the agreement means for Barts of London, which will place its paying students at Maltese hospitals for their practical training.

Alexander Clayman, elected representative on the faculty board for medicine, said the agreement gives the University of Malta legal permission to operate within publicly funded institutions, more importantly Mater Dei Hospital, where in the near future up to 600 medical students will spend three years training to become doctors.

An intercollegiate board will also ensure optimal use of resources without encroaching on the current requirements of the Malta Medical School, the government said, while Barts will be paying for clinical access in government hospitals – but this is part of the global fee Barts will pay to run its degree course in Malta.

The agreement will also allow University of Malta medical students to be placed in other public-private partnership hospitals such as St Luke’s Hospital and Karen Grech Hospital – now to be run by Vitals Global and Partners Healthcare International – at the discretion of the government and these operators.

“Although the agreement is alleged to specify that up to 600 University of Malta students are allowed simultaneous placements in publicly-funded institutions, the fact that ‘placement’ has not been defined in terms of hours nor in terms of student-doctor/tutor ratio, means there is considerable residual concern that the quality of medical education for Malta’s future doctors is at risk of deterioration,” Clayman said.

Barts, a faculty of Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), will run its €175,000 degree course from its campus at the Gozo General Hospital, and will be able to place up to 180 students at one time in hospitals in Malta.

This raised concerns among faculty staff members and students of “sharing” teaching resources at the medical school with Barts’s student-doctors, and eat into the resources that were formerly reserved for University of Malta students.

Mater Dei and Malta’s other hospitals already offer some 450 university students the vast majority of clinical specialities. But with seven Maltese students to each consultant, this ratio is itself testimony to the strained resources at MDH: students even sit out on surgery sessions because only a maximum of three can be in the theatre at any one time.

On the other hand, Barts operates a strict tutor-student ratio: two students for each consultant at outpatients and in theatre, and four students for ward rounds.

“The term ‘placement’ has been left open to interpretation: there is no indication of how many clinical hours each student will have access to, nor any indication of future student-doctor ratios,” Clayman told MaltaToday, who complained that at no point during the formulation of the new agreement were any students included in discussions.

“This is a matter of concern and many of us feel that more students should be engaged in dialogue in the future.”

Clayman said it was disappointing to see that the agreement between the UoM and the government would be kept a secret. “Surely stakeholders such as students, teaching staff and the public at large ought to see agreements that concern them?”, he said.

Barts’s campus will attract paying students to Gozo, although their clinical training in the third, fourth and fifth years will actually happen at Mater Dei Hospital – not at the Gozo General Hospital, which is not equipped for students’ clinical practice.

While Barts can charge €35,000 every year to its students – the intake will be of 60 a year, reaching a full complement of 300 each year – Mater Dei’s consultants were expected to make room for this cohort of students on top of 445 student-doctors from the University of Malta.