- The Rethinking Health campaign calls for major refocus in medical education
- A dynamic group of young doctors and medical students say medical education must evolve to improve future healthcare for everyone. Sarah Stacey reports…
It’s been a cliché for decades that the National Health Service should be renamed the National Sickness Service. But, like many clichés, it embodies a profound truth. Fewer than 20% of patients consulting their GP need medical care.
The rest may or may not get relevant help with non-medical problems that significantly affect their physical and mental health: loneliness, family breakdown, debt, anxiety, depression, cultural or legal problems, environmental issues such as air pollution and poor housing, poor diet and lack of physical activity.
This contributes to a clinical culture with ever-rising costs: from polypharmacy with 10% of drugs dispensed in primary care inappropriate, unnecessary and potential harmful, as the Government’s National Overprescribing Review exposed, to excessive testing, screening, and inappropriate specialist referrals.
According to a group of young doctors and medical students aligned with the College of Medicine, a key problem – which can, they insist, be transformed into a solution – is medical education.
The seven signatories to a letter in the BMJ are co-founders of Rethinking Health, a campaign working to refocus medical education to include health creation and disease prevention.
The campaign launched recently at the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Crisp, former head of the NHS; attendees – all enthusiastic and supportive – included heads of the royal medical colleges, Professor Sir Sam Everington, vice chair of the College of Medicine, and Dr Henrietta Hughes, the Patient Safety Commissioner.
In the BMJ on 16th December 2024, the group writes that ‘current medical education has an overt biomedical focus that does not engage enough on wider social determinants of health’.
‘In order to create a health service that is fit for the future, the future health workforce must also be educated on principles of disease prevention, health creation, and patient-partnered biopsychosocial approaches to wellbeing.’
The Rethinking Health campaign, pictured at the group’s launch recently at the House of Lords, is calling for medical education to prioritise disease prevention and health creation
There is clear evidence, they say, that such an holistic approach not only promotes population wellbeing but also relieves pressure on an over-burdened system, both in primary and secondary health care.
In addition, creating a healthier and happier population makes economic sense, relieving the burden on an over-stretched NHS and helping to get people off benefits and back to work.
Shockingly, one study found that 80% of final year medical students reported no teaching on lifestyle medicine in the last two years of education. A young doctor (not one of this group) told me that while she was pleased to get top marks in her exam on prescribing drugs, there was no teaching at all on deprescribing.
Nowadays, patients present with ever more complex concerns, which demand far more from health professionals than ‘neat, singular and discreet diagnoses’.
While the core responsibilities of doctors as diagnosticians and technicians must be protected and promoted in medical education, the Rethinking Health campaign insists that medical students must also be taught about fields beyond biomedicine so that they can competently and confidently care for patients with broader, evidence-based interventions.
Read the full article in the BMJ here