Medicine 2025 entry

[HGC2]

Inspired and slightly terrified reading the 2023 entry threads and how much prep has to go into a medicine application!

DC wants to do medicine, probably in Scotland as a Scottish student, doing well at school but this doesn't seem to be enough! School has little / no experience of applications for medicine as a not fantastic state school!

Can anyone advise what work experience / volunteering they will need (currently volunteering at sports club with hope of job)
what are the spreadsheets that people talk about?
How do you strategically apply?

I have one child at uni and they just applied and got a place, this seems like a whole other level!

In answer to the previous question, this is in the Mail today.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13554367/GPs-struggling-work-survey-reveals-despite-staff-shortages-waits-patients.html

"Doctor's union the British Medical Association (BMA), said 84 per cent of locum GPs, those medics that fill in when regular GPs are unavailable, say they can't find work."

"BMA officials blamed the Government for ringfencing practice staff recruitment funding to non-doctor professionals for the ongoing crisis for why the vast majority if the 1,350 locum GPs they polled couldn't find any or as much work as they wanted."

Locuming is the way to plug gaps like when you need time to study for exams, or to gain experience, or perhaps to retain skills when you have a young family. Especially when added to the training bottleneck which means junior doctors can wait years to get on a specialist training place. Good that the BMA have taken it up. The whole lack of planning has really undermined the confidence and morale of overworked F1/F2s. Lets hope Wes Streeting is listening.

(Sorry that its a bit off topic, but again I think others are right and interviewees are wise to know about current issues within the NHS.)

The whole lack of planning has really undermined the confidence and morale of overworked F1/F2s.

A pertinent Q is whether it has undermined “the confidence and morale” of those soon to be applying for a medical degree.

Will it affect applications numbers, resulting in a decline?

Or do those young people have faith that it will be resolved by the time they get to that stage? In that time period, a lot can change.

My DC wishes to proceed, and they are prepared to go overseas to work if necessary.

But I wonder if a lot of parents who previously recommended or supported their DC doing medicine as a safe & respectable career may no longer do so as readily.

As the doctors union the BMA has an obvious bias. The health service should not be employing lots of locums - it is a very inefficient way to provide a service. Locums generally cost a lot more than salaried staff. Though if they want a GP position they could move to Scotland. Lots of jobs round here, including some locum ones.

I'm finding if harder to be positive about medicine as a carer. Having a daughter who is finishing her F1 (& who has had a fantastic time but is massively over worked & underpaid) I can see all the issues coming next year when she wants a job at the end of F2.

She's taken the US exam, just in case, and has looked at Aus and NZ as options too. But she wants to stay, so it will all come down to the stupid MSRA exam.

I am cautiously hopeful that things have to change. Because the other option is too scary to think about.

Portsmouth have suspended their PA degree today. It's a start.

And my DD has done several locum shifts. She's had to, to make up the pay she's lost from strikes. They pay at a rate that seems much more what they are worth !

LBC radio are going to do a call in / program covering the Doctors not able to find work. Starting at 5pm today
May be an interesting listen
https://www.lbc.co.uk/

@SoTiredNeedHoliday my blood pressure couldn't take it 😊

Good news re Portsmouth. Hope others will follow suit.
It was really a shortsighted attempt to solve a longstanding problem.

This is old data so apologies for that. But plus ca change etc. Some of the London medical schools which have a very strong reputation are brought down by some of the others who do not, since they are all grouped together. That's an issue with this paper. But it gives an idea of the reasons behind differences in outcome even though the allocation for F1 has changed significantly, and so everyone has an equal chance at that stage. But this paper looks at the stages beyond F1.

So, for anyone interested: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-6-5

My own view is that this bottleneck serves the twin political purposes of being able to offer up positive headline news about additional medical students being trained while at the same time suppressing costs (higher tier doctors cost more: more apologies for stating the obvious). Win win for the politicians. Either that (the cynics' view) or perhaps it's just that no-one at the top has a clue. The medical students themselves are clearly not a major consideration for the people making decisions, again unless the decision makers are just not thinking this through.

I feel a bit sorry for the PAs however. Morale is very low.

I think a combination of not having a clue and there not being the political will to do what is necessary. You see it in their thin manifesto promises .

It's very disappointing that even Labour just seems to keep talking about more medical school places - unless I'm missing something.

This research shows Oxford university medics doing the best, unless I’m reading it wrong. Interesting indeed.

That research is very very old and the data is from students who graduated between 1989and 2005 - times when med school selection processes and medical careers were vastly different and the old boy network was still thriving.

I really don't think anything very useful can be extrapolated from it for today's cohort.

It is old data Haffdonga - I caveated that at the outset. But the paper is not yet discredited. It was accepted and published in 2008. The author used a long spread of data but the paper is dated 2008 and so the conclusions were considered valuable sixteen years ago. That's not too long ago in research terms for something like this. The OBN in the early 2000s was nothing like it was in the seventies and early to mid eighties. In addition this paper is based on raw exam performance. There's a reason for that : it isn't simply listing the alma maters of those who were getting to the senior jobs. The exams don't differ much from the exams today. If you look at the credits, the methodology is completely sound. And the points made in the paper seem to ally with common sense too. It's very draining for academics who spend a lot of time on serious research to be told by those who don't want to agree with its results that their research is not valid simply because of the passage of a few years. I assume that's why the author of this paper went about it as he did, to future proof it to some extent.

But I just put it there for people who might be interested. If an undergraduate writing a dissertation cited this research it would be regarded as completely legitimate. The author is still at UCL and has a very good reputation: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/people/christopher-mcmanus

I didn't say it wasn't valid research, just that it's of limited relevance to today's cohort. Exams may not have changed much since 1989, but all university selection processes, teaching styles, curricula and the whole 'culture' of the job have changed enormously since then.
Some universities clearly offer more 'value added' than others. That's always going to be the case but I don't think which are the 'value adding' universities is an unchangeable fact set in stone for ever more.

The structure of post graduate training (and recruitment) has changed a great deal since this publication.
i don’t think it can be extrapolated to the reality of things now.

I think the pecking order is very similar sixteen years on in terms to be honest Haffdonga. The QS rankings for Medicine 2024 aren't so different (Imperial and UCL are high, as you'd expect, but in this paper they aren't separated out from the other London unis so are much lower in the findings than they would otherwise be). If one's going down the line that entry to the top universities was easier in 1989 to 2005 (more independent schools/ OBN), then that would actually reinforce the results of this paper for the current generation not detract from its findings. And I'm wondering if you've seen which years are used for which exams? The long haul back to 1989 is only for Part 1s.

But it was only linked for interest. People will take from it what they will. I've been wondering what flaws there are in the paper which might now reduce its value but I can't see that any of the factors you list would make any difference to the research outcome. If anything, entry standards have gone up as student loans mean that students want as much value for money as possible and as the numbers competing for the top ranked unis have multiplied. So although I see that there are certain differences here and there, I don't agree that they undermine anything significant in the author's conclusions - if anything the opposite.

Yes for sure. But what changes could you say would make a material difference? I'm not sure that the substance of anything has changed, if you look in the round. Interested to know what you'd identify as something which would account for a change in the findings? I just can't think of anything myself. There are clear parallels on all scores, unless I'm missing something.

I wasn’t extrapolating.

So really I'm jut saying that it seems to me that all the changes which are being referenced as invalidating (or at least reducing the relevance) of the research findings would actually have the opposite effect and re-inforce it or at least be neutral. But it would be interesting if anyone could isolate any changes which would actually turn the research on its head.

It will be interesting to see what impact the random allocation at F1 stage has and the MLA (which this paper has advocated adopting for the very reason that it is hard to measure the success of different schools). It is always hard to disentangle the impact of selective education. The work that the universities have been doing on widening participation may also impact the findings with more people now without parental contacts in the profession.

It will also be interesting specifically for Oxbridge to see the impact of cutting the BMAT. My dd might have considered them more if she did not have a good UCAT already and did not want them enough to bet on the BMAT. It will also be interesting to see what impact the move away from the traditional pre clinical/ clinical years in some of the schools has on the findings. Different people will of course be attracted to different styles of teaching, as indeed was my dd. It will also mean for this year onwards that it will be possible to look at pre entry scores on ucat compared to final scores on MLA. This will probably still only show us how successful the schools have been at training students to pass a multiple choice exam but it will provide another metric to examine.

That is the issue with research in general it is always looking at the past and what has happened, it can't tell us about what will happen to students about to enter training now. It is like looking at an Ofsted report on an outstanding school in 2008 and expecting the culture and results to be the same for a child entering the school in 2025. Without it though there will be no comparisons possible and it can flag where things need to change. I imagine that many of the changes above are as a result of the research, both nationally and in individual schools, and of course Durham is not in the race at all now.

Most young doctors now are just hoping to be employed at the end of F2, which was not the situation in 2005.