Anyone have experience of studying medicine in English in Europe?

[rickyrickygrimes]

I work in an international school in France. All the students are English / French bilingual, and I specifically advise students looking to study at university in English. I'm getting requests quite often from students who want to study medicine / vet, but they don't want to stay in France (where the system is brutal with competitive exams throughout). The problems is that the countries we usually send students to just don't work for medicine.
US & Canada - can't study medicine as an undergrad, they'd have to do a first degree and then take med as a postgrad. possibly, but it's a long haul / cost.
Netherlands - the only English-taught medicine course has recently been discontinued.
Ireland - insanely competitive. They'd need to get 21/20 in their Bac to have a chance.
UK - since Brexit they mostly qualify as international students = insane fees.

So increasingly they are asking me about studying medicine (and vet) in other European countries - Malta, Greece, Romania, Latvia among others. I understand the 'official' line - the degrees which have been approved by the EU should be accepted across the EU. The issue is being accepted to actually work as / register as a Dr in other countries after qualifying. I suspect that the UK would snap them up, while France is very very resistant to allowing Drs trained elsewhere to register.

Anyone got experience of these courses? And their post-qualification acceptance?

The students I’m advising are by and large French so they are in their ‘home’ system. The catch is that they are doing an international version of the Bac (which is specifically intended to equip them to go on to study in English speaking countries if they want to), many of them have already lived outside France due to their parents work and they are all English /French bilinguals.

Prior to Brexit it all worked fine - the majority of them went to the UK as they would be paying local fees and the British universities were well aware of the situation with the French grading system so offers were contextualised. After Brexit though they are mostly classed as international students, and the fees are huge. So we / they / their parents are looking for English-taught options outside France now. It’s slim-pickings in some subjects, medicine being one of them.

That may well be true for the best schools, but I assume the few people I know of who have done this because they couldn’t get a place in Germany will not necessarily have gone to the best in any country. The tuition cost plays no role for Germans as no tuition is chargeable here (just a fairly low admin fee). And the cost of living would have not played a role either - these families were certainly wealthy enough to pay for their kids’ education. The motivation was purely that they could get in - and quicker - with lower grades.

The Leaving cert is either inflated (as we were told by an Irish teacher at her school), or else more weight is given to Irish school leavers. Both have the same result. My DD had an HPAT score in the high 90s, plus an IB score over 40 (albeit with SL maths) yet she ended up only in the second round of offers.

And an explanation for why Ireland is feeling so much pressure. A small country unable to replace the UKs strong HE offer.

The Irish move to fund additional places in Ulster medical schools is interesting. Ireland, politically, seeing those in the North as Irish yet if taking the standard three A levels have no chance of a medical school place in the South. Yet if there were unification, they would need doctors in Enniskillen. Overseas recruited doctors don't stay. As soon as a job comes up they hot foot it to a major English town with community. Far better to train Padraig who grew up in the area. Indeed Ulster University has just opened a graduate medicine course which apparently almost all grads from the south.

This is very interesting - would pupils in the NI system really not stand a chance atm getting into med school in the republic (using terms ni and republic to differentiate locations). I know we have a huge influx of students coming up as queens and uu both good options and CoL much better here. But I would dearly love my kids to go south! Not necessarily for medicine though.

I also know getting into queens to do med as an undergraduate is insanely competitive right now as I know outstanding young applicants with a stars coming out of their ears having to take years out to reapply.

Two factors. If you live in a rural location in the South, Dublin is seriously expensive. And, depending on your preferences, Belfast may be a better student location than Galway. (There is a general trend of Irish students going to Queens.)
Second is if you have taken A levels you have a far better chance of getting into Queens than into the Republic which essentially looks for 4A*s and a language at GCSE.

Then taking F1/F2 in NI is reasonably straightforward as it is possibly the least popular UK deanery, so takes those who put it first. After that you hit the general UK career/job bottleneck but if you are prepared to work in a less popular location you should be to move south of the border. Or start off with a locum job in somewhere like Enniskillen.

The cruch comes when applying for training. NI F1/F2s are on an older more demanding contract and the health service is so stretched not enough research is going on. So they are at a real disadvantage when applying for training places - decisions made in London where those in London teaching hospitals or who have invested in specialist preparation in, say, India have the advantage.

Competition in other subjects will also have risen because of the interest from the rest of the EU but will probably (perhaps not economics) be less competitive. Observation only but there seems a bit of a trend for students from England to also consider Trinity.

So the patients the English students engage with during their studies are fluent in English? Or the student stands there like a lemon during patient interactions not knowing what on earth is going on and unable to contribute?

and interventions with nurses?

No @weekendwatch not the case at all. Read my posts. Practically none of the patients my DD came across could speak English, but by that time, after 2 years of studying it, her Bulgarian was fluent.

Within 2 years your DD went from not understanding a word to being fluent?

and there are levels of fluency
Fluency in medical terminology much more higher benchmark than social

Did she get a place at a UK uni to study medicine?
Did your get vet daughter get a place at a UK uni to study VS ?

One thing to look at is the drop out rates for some of these courses, particularly past the third year . For a variety of reasons they are very high for foreign students taught in English eg Prague and other universities and some of this may well be related to the language requirements for the clinical years , some possibly related to students who have struggled to reach attainment needed to apply to U.K. university.

The knock on from this is some universities then produce graduates with very little clinical experience and as someone who has been involved in post graduate dental education this is something we have seen a lot and my colleagues in hospital have certainly seen this in junior medics .

i suspect your child may be highly unusual and not the norm!

Two years of language lessons five times a week? I would imagine most people would get to a fairly good level. I think a lot of foreign doctors in the UK would have less training in English than that.

Neither of them got places in the UK despite both having undergrad and honours degrees (the doctor one got a first for biomedical science) and the vet one having a research Masters in biology. Its mad in my eyes!

Fairly good level… absolutely

Fluent to the extent of medical terminology? No

Neither got a place at any uk university to study medicine or veterinary science? @theDudesmummy

How much did you pay for the pair to study for so many years abroad?

i highly doubt that's the equivalent. Most people in other countries learn English from primary school age onwards .

But it's quite possibly a focused language course.

Members of my extended family studied Medicine in Moscow and Science in East Germany and both came back fluent in the relevant languages with enough technical vocabulary for their courses but possibly less able to discuss, for example, the use of imagery in 20th century verse.

Within 2 years from knowing zilch?

Does this not somewhat demonstrate that candidates of a particular calibre ie not up to standard to study their chosen field at any university in UK, look to Bulgaria etc as their only alternative?

ie less pull more PUSH

I know nothing about medicine, but my DN didn't get into veterinary in Ireland so studied in Poland instead where the entrance requirements were significantly lower. It was a tough five years, but DN is now fully qualified and back in Ireland working as a vet and fully registered.

@Somelast well yes, that is the point. But finding out that even having a first in biomed, or a Masters in biology, is not enough was quite a surprise to me. I had nothing like that when I got into med school fresh from school (which was in another country, I admit, but I was still really surprised).

And my DD learned Bulgarian from scratch, yes. It was an essential part of the med school course and one that had to be passed well in order to progress to the clinical years. She had five tutorials a week and a lot of homework, for two years. As I said upthread, many people would be pretty fluent after that, whatever the language (and Bulgarian is less difficult than some). As far as I know everyone in her class passed and progressed to the clinical years.

Learning fluent enough Greek to get a surgery training post in Greece after an even shorter period (and few formal lessons, just living with her Greek boyfriend) was the thing that really impressed me!

Bulgaria is not the only option though. There's Poland, Sweden, Spain (much more expensive) and a few more, or at least there were when we looked, which was obviously quite a few years ago now.

@Weekendwatch no, both applied to many places and got nothing.