UCL medical student wins top UK essay prize

A UCL medical student on a psychotherapy training programme run at Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust (C & I) has won a national prize for the best essay examining the doctor-patient relationship.

Harriet Hall, a fourth year medical student, won the prize for her essay about an encounter with a patient she discussed in her student Balint group, which is run by the Trust’s Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Service.

The group enables students to discuss their emotional reactions to being with medically and psychologically unwell patients during their first year of clinical medicine – under the principles established by Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint.    

Harriet’s prize from the UK Balint Society is the third such win since the inception in 2004 at C&I of the UCL Student Balint Scheme. Her essay will be published in the Journal of the Balint Society and she will be given her prize at the International Balint Federation Congress in Oxford in September this year. One of the other members of Harriet's Balint group, Jonathan Illiff, was a runner up for the prize.