Few people are under the illusion that health-science placements are easy: long hours, truckloads of information to absorb, patients to care for and, in many cases, no pay.
This newspaper has previously documented the gruelling conditions of a health-science work placement. In 2019, health science students spoke about working two jobs to keep afloat, long days and nights, chaotic hospital scenes and no pay. One midwifery student went as far as saying that placement was akin to “slave labour”.
It is clear that in criminally underfunded hospitals around the country, students essentially serve as an extra pair of hands, rather than focusing on the reason they’re there: to learn.
But even with all the bad press surrounding placement, the poor state of Trinity’s School of Medicine outlined in a 2018 report by the Irish Medical Council could seldom have been imagined.
Students described the educational roles of staff as hazy, with students speaking of a “fend for yourself” approach to placement. Some third-year students, for example, said that they felt that they were “considered a burden on the teams to which they were allocated”.
Students also complained of the financial burden of the course which requires certain travel expenses and a number of compulsory courses, “some of which were self-funded and expensive”, the report said.
Beyond issues with placement, students complained of “an intense curriculum”, which was inhibited by “poor administration and placement planning and a reliance on self-directed learning”.
Perhaps most damningly, the report also found that third and fifth-year students said that they were experiencing a high level of stress and that the supports provided by the School and the College were “not effective”.
In the current climate, any suggestion that Ireland’s future doctors are receiving a subpar education is a cause for much concern. It is abundantly clear that placements are too burdensome for all health science students, and that College needs to do more to support the country’s future nurses, midwives and doctors.
