CHIME News
- BMJ Editorial: Caldicott 2 and Patient Data
- "Patient Safety, Law Policy and Practice" Published in Paperback
- UCL Joins the European Connected Health Alliance
- UCL CHIME is Early Contributor to New Health Informatics Online Resource
- Professor Dipak Kalra takes up Presidency of the EuroRec Institute
- 2012 European Summit on Trustworthy Reuse of Health Data – plenary sessions now available on YouTube
- "Patient Safety, Law Policy and Practice"
- Ethnicity and academic performance in medicine
- Uptake of flu vaccine among healthcare workers
- Open Source, Open Standards, and Health Care Information Systems
- howRU, a new short generic measure of health status
- Dr Don E. Detmer honoured by American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
- Public 'reassured' by swine flu media coverage
- Key NHS IT Programmes – UCL report
- UKHIT online - Computers and the Internet
- Group membership and staff turnover affect outcomes in group CBT for persistent pain
- Electronic patient records are not a panacea
- Using computerised CBT to prevent mental health problems: a systematic review and a case study of Xanthis
- New Students Begin UCL Postgraduate Programme in Health Informatics
- CHIME researcher contributes to new book
Ethnicity and academic performance in medicine
14 March 2011
UK trained doctors and medical students from minority ethnic groups tend to underperform academically compared with their white counterparts, according to a new study by UCL academics.
This attainment gap has persisted for many years and must be tackled to ensure a fair and just method of training and assessing current and future doctors, say the authors in the British Medical Journal today. A third of all UK medical students and junior doctors are from minority ethnic groups.
The research team, including CHIME’s Dr Henry Potts, analysed the results of 22 reports comparing the academic performance of 23,742 medical students and UK trained doctors from different ethnic groups. They found that candidates of non-white ethnicity underperformed compared with white candidates.
First author Dr Katherine Woolf (Division of Medical Education) said: “The effect identified is statistically significant and widespread across different medical schools, different types of exam, and in both undergraduate and postgraduate assessments. Indeed, ethnic differences in attainment seem to be a consistent feature of medical education in the UK have persisted for at least the past three decades – so they cannot be dismissed as atypical or local problems.”
Co-author Professor Chris McManus (formerly of CHIME and now Division of Medical Education and Division of Psychology) added: “While exam performance is by no means the only marker of good performance as a doctor or medical student, the fact remains that without passing finals, medical students cannot become doctors, and without passing postgraduate exams, it is much harder for doctors to progress in a medical career.
“It’s clear that more research is needed, and preferably on a national basis, to get to the bottom of this issue. We need more detailed information to track the problem as well as further research into its causes. Without these actions, it will be a struggle to ensure a fair and just method of training and assessing our future and current doctors."
Contact: Henry Potts
Links:
Research paper on bmj.com http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.d901
Story on UCL's main news site
