“Management” to doctors used to exclusively refer to what the plan was to do for patients. Or possibly to the people sitting in offices who direct the operations of the hospital. Why then is there a British Association of Medical Managers? In 1991 this independent charity set up in order to provide management skills for doctors. Last year, BAMM set up the punningly-named BAMMbino for junior doctors. This year, they plan to go even further and recruit medical students.
Management skills in business terms are not something which are found explicitly in many undergraduate medical curricula. An MBA and an MBChB do not have much in common beyond their first two letters. It’s good that students have the opportunity to develop their management skills, opportunities will not really come until later career-wise when there are people junior to you. As a medical student, you do what you are told.
Radical changes to undergraduate medical curricula should not be implemented lightly, especially at a time when both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons of England are threatening to introduce their own exit exams because of reductions in core knowledge of pharmacology and anatomy (respectively).
- Dom
