Warp Speed Training of Medical Professionals

A Public Announcement is Pending in Ontario, Canada

Yesterday, March 7, 2023, a presentation was given at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It focused on the declared COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it was to address “what we didn't know what we know now and what we wished we had known, the expected and unexpected and policies and principles for next time”.

I just published an article that dealt with the revelation that the Ontario government apparently never officially supported COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ mandates.

Here, I would like to bring your attention to another clip from the presentation [start time: 56:09; end time: 1:00:14]. A question was raised about how to deal with the burn-out and general shortage of medical professionals. Dr. Kieran Moore, Medical Officer of Health for the province of Ontario, Canada, contributes to the answer starting at 59:32.

Apparently, announcements about how the government will be addressing these issues will be forthcoming. However, in this video clip, Dr. Moore has provided highlights of what he sees as the best way to move forward…

1. Shorten the time to get into medical school.

2. Shorten the duration of medical and nursing training.

3. Shorten residencies (post-graduate hands-on learning; like an apprenticeship).

As someone who has a lot of experience training students at the undergraduate, professional degree, and post-graduate levels, I have serious concerns about this. These include…

• In Ontario, we already reduced secondary school training by one year, from five to four years. Now, we have non-adult learners beginning college and university training. There is a big difference in the average maturity and knowledge base of seventeen- versus eighteen-year-olds. In my experience, most of the very young people entering our colleges and universities seem lost and they struggle mightily with the sudden immersion into much more independent lives with a concomitant adoption of heavy workloads with strict deadlines that were never previously enforced. Mental health issues among undergraduate students seems to be at an all-time high.

  Evidence that sending seventeen-year-olds to college or university might be premature, is the growing phenomenon of young people opting to take grade ‘12+’ (i.e., a fifth year of high school). Interestingly, many people in Ontario don’t know that there is growing push-back against this. Students must justify staying for an extra year. There are rumours that more restrictions on this might be on the way. Is this a way to avoid having to hire more teachers and staff for the growing number of students seeking a return to five-year high school?

• Coinciding with shortening high school is the fact that youth tend to mature more slowly as the generations move along; gone are the days of having a family, homestead, and working the back forty by age twenty.

• Shortening the entry time to medical schools would presumably mean that students will be able to apply after the second or third year of undergraduate studies. This means many students entering medical school would be as young as nineteen-years-old and they would not have completed their undergraduate training.

• Currently, most medical training programs are four years in duration. Dr. Moore is proposing to shorten this to three years or even less! This means that people could be granted doctor of medicine degrees as young as 22 years of age should his plan become reality.

• The growth of knowledge in medical science has been explosive since the emergence of the internet age. There is more to learn now, than at any time in history. I don’t see how shortening the learning process is possible without compromising breadth and/or depth of knowledge. This is very concerning because the physician-led debacle of the declared COVID-19 pandemic has shown that there is already a profound lack of expertise in key areas of medical science that compromised critical thinking.

  [Note: I am not accusing all physicians of lacking expertise and/or critical thinking that resulted in poor decisions with respect to COVID-19. There were some courageous exceptions. However, too few of these, if any, were among the policy-makers.]

• Residencies might be the most important part of the training. This is where the ‘rubber meets the road’, but with a seasoned mentor working alongside to ensure the safety and best care of the patient. I would rather have people go through more of this kind of training, not less, thank you very much.

Do we really want to run our future physicians and nurses through warp speed-like training programs? Would these be the people that we want looking after a population whose average age and concomitant health problems are rising?

Do the prospective trainees really want to have their educations compressed while the performance expectations remain unchanged? This would place excessive expectations on younger, less mature individuals.

Is it fair to expect young people to retain the same amount of information when it is force-fed to them at an accelerated rate? It seems to me that young people are already experiencing information overload in their modern tech-rich lives. It seems like giving them more time to sort through the chaos might be helpful.

How are the students and/or their families supposed to pay for this accelerated training? Summers would be for studying in these accelerated programs. Getting summer jobs to pay for tuition would not be an option. Or will these accelerated training programs only be for the rich?

Overall, this seems like a recipe for disaster. I fear we would be setting many young people up for failure and/or dissatisfaction in their careers

Another key problem noted in the discussion in the video clip is the lack of people available to conduct training. I can definitely speak to this. The budgets of colleges and universities have steadily declined in terms of spending power over many years. This has resulted in a loss of a lot of positions, including faculty positions. Simultaneously, more students have been recruited to bring in more tuition monies. What isn’t talked about very much is the ballooning of administrative positions across all colleges and universities. The net result is there are fewer faculty members being asked to train more students, while wading through much more red tape.

If better training is wanted, I recommend reducing the student : teacher ratio. Instead, we are being encouraged to do things like develop on-line courses to simultaneously teach thousands of students around the world. This is because one faculty member teaching thousands of paying students = more $.

We are also being asked to recruit international students. This is being done under the guise that international students bring greater diversity. Although this is true, the real reason that isn’t publicized is that international students pay much higher tuitions. So, more international students = more $. Worse, when we do recruit international students, our administrations that asked us to do so are all-too-often unable to provide proper supports to ensure the success of these students (e.g.; finding housing, assisting with immigration-related issues, etc.).

These are not recipes for quality education. Instead education is being run too much like a business these days. Sadly, business experience is one of the most important requirements for administrative staff being recruited into our colleges and universities these days. We need to shed some of the administrative burden at our institutions and stop adopting business models for education. Receiving personal attention in-person from a senior mentor who sincerely cares about the well-being of trainees is the key to a quality education.

The disastrous economic impacts of the mismanagement of the declared COVID-19 pandemic have set us up for even more cuts to budgets; and they will likely be severe and chronic. The past three years have resulted in an outlook for postsecondary education in Ontario that is extremely bleak.

As I ponder all of these things, I wonder how much of the shortening of education in Ontario actually has to do with saving money as opposed to a genuine interest in ensuring that people get the best training possible. Short-sighted attempts to resolve our shortage of health care professionals do not constitute proper solutions. Our government could have seen this coming and dealt with it years ago. Now it is a near-panic scenario and we have all seen how our government performs when this happens.

If I have learned anything from the public health debacle over the past three years, it is that we need to invest MORE time into better-quality in-person training of our health professionals, especially in areas like immunology, which is a subject for which some of our MD students receive as few as five lectures. And yet, there isn’t a single aspect of medicine that does not involve the immune system. As a comparator, I have traditionally provided 24 lectures, two independent learning assignments, three review sessions, and two three-hour laboratories to students in the doctor of veterinary medicine program, while offering formal office hours and, outside of that, an open-door office policy.

The last thing that we need in the future is superficially-trained health professionals that will almost blindly lead us down the wrong path again upon the declaration of the next pandemic.

---