in an article published in the Sunday Express of July 26, headlined ’Race or Cultural Preference’’?, Mr Kevin Baldeosingh stated that ’cultural predilections may be the key factor in explaining why, for example, so many Indians become medical doctors. In Trinidad and Tobago almost 80 per cent of doctors are Indo-Trinidadian. This is also the case with medical students and in 2007, Prof Courtenay Bartholomew alleged that the admissions board of the Mt Hope Medical School was biased.’ He then went on to say that when it was pointed out that most members of ’the admissions board’ were of African descent, I then claimed that the hierarchy had undue influence on which students were accepted.

In fact, I was indeed told that, contrary to my recommendation, the ’hierarchy’ of the university insisted that the A-level criteria for admission into medical school should not be changed. As for ’cultural predilection,’ it is certainly not the key factor in explaining the ethnic disparity. However, I am not going there today. Suffice it to say that we doctors know better. This is my fowl yard and I choose to leave it at that.

With respect to the other statement that most members of the ’admissions board’ (as far as I know, it is called the Faculty of Medical Sciences Entrance Committee) are of African descent, this unfortunately is also wrong. I am told that the committee is comprised of the Dean as Chairman, the Deputy Dean (Clinical), the Deputy Dean (Basic Sciences), the Director of the School of Pharmacy, the Director of the School of Veterinary Medicine, the Director of the School of Dentistry, the Administrative Officer (Faculty of Medical Sciences), and the Assistant Registrar (Admissions). However, only the first three of these members select applicants for the ’school of medicine,’ and, I am also told that on the contrary, as one example, in 2006-2008, two of them were Indo-Trinidadian and the other was a non-Trinidadian of African heritage!

It is important to appreciate that the membership of that committee frequently changes every three years or so as do Deans, Deputy Deans and Heads of Departments. But what concerns me about those who have the authority to select students for medical school is that, contrary to what many would expect, it is not unusual for many of these Deans and Deputy Deans have the least impressive curricula vitae!

Look, I wish to make it quite clear that I have been advocating a BSc requirement for entry into medical school as is the custom in the US and Europe (other than the UK) to the Faculty Board since the early 1970s, long before there was any obvious disparity in the ethnicity of the medical students in Trinidad and Tobago. It had absolutely nothing to do with ethnicity and applied to both Indo and Afro-Trinidadians. In fact, among other things, I also had strong objections to the proposed size of the Mt Hope Complex so much so that some people used to call me ’the Mt Hope complex’! However, when the proposed plan of the complex was placed before the Director of Sodeteg in Paris, he exclaimed: ’But gentlemen, this is too large even for Paris!’

Now, an article in the Express of 30 September, 2007 quoted Sarah Kliff, who wrote a page in Newsweek magazine of September 10, 2007 with the headline ’Well-Rounded Docs’’. The Express wrote: ’She agreed with the argument our own Prof Courtenay Bartholomew has been making,’ and quoted Ms Kliff, who wrote: ’Even as breakthroughs in science and advances in technology make the practice of medicine increasingly complex, medical educators are looking beyond biology and chemistry majors in the search for more well-rounded students who can be molded into caring and analytical doctors. The schools are looking for a kind of compassion and potential doctoring ability. This makes many social science and humanities students particularly well qualified.’

She continued: ’What’s changing, however, is who gets in. When Gail Morrison, who runs admissions at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, searched through the school’s 6,500 yearly applicants, she is not looking for students who spent their undergrad years hunched over biology and physics text books. ’It doesn’t make you a better doctor to know how fast a mass falls from a tree.’ ’

Some months previously I had written in the press that Dr Jules Dienstag, the Dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School, Boston, said: ’The topics covered the many courses in chemistry, physics and mathematics are so removed from human biological principles that they offer little value to the pre-medical student and steal time and attention from more relevant science preparation. Does a student, for example, really need a full year of organic chemistry to prepare for the study of bio-chemistry? College should be a time to explore and stretch not only academically but intellectually, engaging creatively in an expansive liberal arts education encompassing literature, languages, the arts, humanities and social sciences to prepare for citizenship in society, which fosters a mature and all-rounded educated individual.’

So said, as I have already written, this professor of medicine did languages at A-level, so did Prof Sir George Alleyne, previously professor of medicine in Jamaica, and now Chancellor of UWI.

Finally, The Times of London, dated October 24, 2007, carried a headline, ’A-levels face axe in favour of diplomas’’. The article began: ’A-levels could be stopped within six years and replaced by work-based diplomas under the biggest exam shakeup in 20 years, the Government announced yesterday. Ed Balls, the school’s secretary, extended that the diploma to include languages, sciences and humanities in a move designed to appeal to the universities.’

Now, please do not be put off by his name. He is making much sense. Indeed, that sort of entry requirement may be just what the doctor ordered.

- To be continued