dxmedstudent:

Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, said that a decline in hands-on creative subjects at school and practical hobbies at home means that students often do not have a basic understanding of the physical world.Backing a campaign by educational thinktank the Edge Foundation to encourage more creative subjects in the national curriculum, Kneebone said spending hours engaged in virtual worlds was no substitute for experience in the real world.

Okay, you know what? I’m mad. Not at the interestingly named Mr Kneebone, but at the wider picture. Whilst the popularityof smartphones is real, there are still lots of young people out there making artistic things and being practical with their hands.  I just think it’s harder for those people to get into medicine.

You want students to be more creative? Stop putting up the grade requirements for what you need to get into med school. There’s no reason why someone with A*AA would be a better doctor than someone with AAA or even AAB. You need someone with academic skills, but getting good grades is more than enough proof of someone’s ability to understand the basics and work hard; they don’t need to have ‘perfect’ results. Because it’s hard to balance A levels and getting the high grades you need to get in, with the extracurricular activities you need for emdicine, and preparing for the entrance  . And frankly, well-meaning older figures who got into med school when the grade boundaries were much lower, probably can’t always understand what the pressures are like today, unless they listen.

But Arts and crafts are incredibly time consuming and therefore
difficult. And other arts that help with manual dexterity (say, playing
an instrument) are also very time -consuming. Everyone likes the idea of
a student who can play the violin or paint well, but they also like the
idea of picking students with the absolute highest numerical marks;
they want to have their cake and eat it. We end up with students feeling pressured to spend less time on creative exploits, only to be told that they aren’t developing enough skills because they gave up playing the piano or doodling to get the grades to get in and stay in medicine.

But if
you basically demand students have absolutely exceptional grades and
ever increasing percentages in their exams, you’re basically
guaranteeing that students who are creative will  be forced to put less
time into their hobbies or give up entirely, in order to keep up with
the demands. Because there’s only so much time in the day. And
most of the creative students I know didn’t necessarily get the absolute
best grades; they did welll, sure, but the students who do absolutely
best in exams are often those with very little life outside of revision.

I’m a crafty person; I learned to knit, to embroider, to sew. I taught myself to draw, to paint, to create. I’m exactly the kind of former med student that is perfect on paper in this context And you know what? That’s only ever been an interesting aside in medicine; my skills and interests in that arena have never been valued seriously, because when it matters, the criteria always default back to things like grades or publications, and eportfolios are another kind of hell entirely. At the med school application level, hobbies are a very small part of applications compared to grades, entrance exams, interviews, and the entirety of your personal statement, though at least they are acknowledged in that context. Further up, they count for a lot less. The emphasis is much more on other achievements. Which is what it is; there’s a lot to be said about medical training, progression, and what we choose to value or allocate points for when it comes to applications etc. But the point here is that it’s not entirely fair to criticise people for not allocating a huge amount of time to pursuits that you don’t in any way encourage or value when it comes to it. I am creative in spite of being in medicine, rather than being enabled by it.  If you really think creativity adds to medicine, then perhaps encouraging it, or explicitly valuing it in those who take the time, would encourage more people to be open about their interests, and encourage more people to keep up with them.

Maybe this’d all be very well, if working in medicine itself didn’t crush the creativity, mental health, and general life out of the people who work in it. Many people I’ve worked with have expressed concerns with how medicine is increasingly becoming dominated by basic ‘service provision’ (i.e keeping the service running, but at the expense of learning opportunities or chances to really engage with patients), and protocols, and how the ability to think creatively in medicine is increasingly stifled because our progression is 100% about ticking boxes on our portfolios, which are surprisingly hard to actually do, because there’s just so many boxes to tick on top of working busy jobs with plenty of oncall 12h shifts. From what I know about surgical training, I don’t think it’s any healtheir than general medical training. There’s probably a lot that we could improve.

And I agree, these hobbies and skills and being good with your hands is definitely important for medicine, particularly surgery. They are also just really, really fun in general, and it’d be great if more people got to explore their creative side. I don’t see the world as being separated between ‘creatives’ and non-creatives; I really believe that anyone can get into creative hobbies at any time in their life, and that there’s a creative hobby out there for everyone, potentially. One of my best friends picked up drawing again in her 30s, and I’m so glad she did, because it’s amazing how quickly she’s improved, and how much joy she gets out of it, and I honestly enjoy seeing her journey so much. So many people tell me “Ah you draw? I wish I could draw! I’m no good at that!”, but I think that they might well have more potential than they realised, if they didn’t feel put off by the idea that you have to pick up a hobby as a child, or else you won’t be any good. But that doesn’t ahve to be true, and anyhow, hobbies or creating don’t have to be about being good, they can be about enjoyment.

But I don’t think it’s constructive to bemoan youngsters “not doing X enough” in general, or act like we’re divorced from all this. We, those in medicine, those who shape training, those who pick the criteria for what students get in, and those of us who shape society (that’s everyone, you included) also shoulder the responsibility. If we want students to do something, it’s up to us to facilitate that. To encourage. To give them the tools and the environment where exploring new hobbies is encouraged. To form an environment where students can learn these skills, and develop these experiences. I learned the fibre arts from my mum; many people might not have that kind of encouragement at a young age if their parents missed out on it. So how can we encourage kids into woodwork, or crafting, or music. Music is another rant and post altogether; learning instruments is expensive and difficult and it’s easy for a wealthy person to say ‘why aren’t kids learning instruments?’ as if everyone has the money to give their kids bassoon lessons. But in reality it can be hard to encourage participation in  we need to think about how to encourage kids to try new things, and to dedicate time to hobbies, in a world that increasingly puts more and more time demands on us all.

Medical students ‘raised on screens lack skills for surgery’