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London medical schools, particularly where the routine of general clinical and
obstetrical teaching had been disrupted by the dispersal of students and patients
in the teaching hospitals by the operation of the emergency hospitals scheme.
A recommendation put forward by the Council to the Inter-Departmental
Committee was that the complete medical service provided by the Council should
be used, not only by augmenting the resources available for teaching in the London
teaching hospitals, but also by the establishment of an undergraduate medical
school based on one of the Council's larger general hospitals and utilising other
hospitals and institutions of the Council for teaching purposes as required. It
was assumed that the new school would become an internal school of the University
of London which, in agreement with the Council, would provide the professorial
and teaching staffs. Such an arrangement would be similar to that obtaining at
present between the British Post-Graduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital
and the Council. Alternatively, the Council itself might be responsible for the
general direction of the school, as in the case of the school for teaching in psychiatry
attached to the Maudsley Hospital. The Council felt that the experience which
it had gained during the last seven years in the case of the British Post-Graduate
Medical School (in which it had satisfactorily met any modifications required in the
administration of Hammersmith Hospital) should be of great value in dealing with
any new project on these lines.
In so far as the Council's resources were, or might be, used to augment the
teaching in voluntary teaching hospitals (apart altogether from the proposal to set
up the new school), the Council pointed out the need for closer integration, particularly
from the point of view of continuity of teaching. A method of securing this
would be the appointment of an advisory board for each combination of linked hospitals
to make recommendations to the hospital authorities concerned for the
appointment of teaching staff, the personnel of the board to consist of representatives
of the voluntary teaching hospitals and of the Council with whom representatives
of the University would be associated. Teaching appointments should be regarded
as including university chairs and readerships, and the recognition of holders of
whole-time posts as teachers of the University, while part-time consultants and
specialists would be available to work in either voluntary or municipal hospitals
or both.
In junior clinical appointments of the registrar and house officer class, relationship
between the linked hospitals and interchangeability between their staffs should
be arranged, and the Council indicated that, in the event of its being decided that a
medical student after qualification, but before registration, should be required to
hold a house appointment, it would be prepared to consider reasonable adjustments
to its medical staffing arrangements to enable that to be done. The Council would
also be prepared to extend after the war, so far as practicable, the arrangements
under which medical students enter into residence at the Council's hospitals for
general clinical, obstetrical or fever instruction.
The Council also recommended that instruction in psychological medicine should
play a more important part in undergraduate medical training in future and that
post-war instruction in psychological medicine should be directed to the preventive,
curative and rehabilitation aspects of that specialty. The services which the
Council performs in the fields of public health and social welfare should also be brought
more closely to the notice of medical students as a means of acquainting them with
these wider aspects of social and preventive medicine, and the Council indicated
its readiness to afford facilities for organised instruction in these services and for the
appointment of its staff as lecturers. The Council also suggested co-ordination of
the facilities for post-graduate medical education in London and the close linkage
of any new centres of post-graduate instruction with the British Post-Graduate
Medical School as the nodal point.