This is part of Unite’s request for a large school nurse recruitment campaign. It estimated that there are now 6,900 children to every specialist school nurse in England, using NHS workforce statistics.

Due to the cervical cancer immunisation for teenage girls and the government push to have a specialist school nurse for every secondary school and its cluster of primary schools by 2010, there is also concern about the increasing Read more »

Medical students graduate, on average, with $140,000 in debt, with many having loans in excess of $200,000.

The majority who enter school wishing to practice primary care often change their minds when greeted with this fiscal reality. Combined with the fact that primary care role models are overburdened in a practice environment so toxic towards generalist practice, it is no wonder that most students change their minds, and gravitate towards Read more »

Some professors at the Harvard Medical School are the biggest beneficiaries of funding and gifts from the drug industry.

These conflicts of interest are causing some dissension within the student body, with some feeling “violated” when being lectured by professors who are paid consultants to drug makers.

This places the school in a difficult position. On one hand, especially at a school as revered as Harvard, the industry pays Read more »

Louise McMenemy, the BMA Medical Student Committee lead said: ‘We are concerned about the obstacles that lie in the path of many pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds who want to study medicine’.

The BMA also believes that universities should publish their strategies of how they intend to widen participation.

‘It is important for the NHS, students and society that we have a medical workforce that Read more »

We are in the midst of a golden age of medical education, with schools expanding at an unprecedented level.

MedPage Today reports from a recent summit of medical educators, where they concluded that, with nine medical schools set to open and the majority of the remaining 126 schools planning to expand class size, this is an “unparalleled opportunity” to reform physician training.

That time can’t come soon enough.

The Read more »

by Andrew Trenton Weil

Over a million US citizens wake up each morning in significant pain from nighttime teeth grinding and clenching (bruxism). Does the fact that these people remain in pain every day mean they don’t have health insurance? No, actually most of these people have health insurance, and they have dentists. Unfortunately, while many dentists are expert at preventing tooth damage and repairing cavities and chipped or worn Read more »

The NEJM takes a look the skyrocketing medical school debt of American students, and the numbers are staggering.

When you include undergraduate debt, medical student graduates are saddled with a burden ranging from $145,000 to $180,000, depending on whether they enroll in public or private universities.

There is no other country that can boast that amount of debt for newly minted physicians, which has to be taken into account Read more »

The union is urging the DoH to double the workforce by immediately recruiting an extra 2,000 qualified school nurses.

The advice follows the data from the child measurement programme showing that one in five children aged 10-11 are obese.

There are more than 3,300 secondary schools in England, and the DoH has pledged to have a school nurse to cover each of these and their surrounding clusters of primary schools by 2010.
Read more »