An old-fashioned learning arena

We spent the first four years of our studies in Tromsø and are now in our second and final year in West Finnmark. We have experienced that the practical-clinical teaching at the university hospital of starting point was suboptimal. All in all, we had a good time at the university and we wouldn’t want to study medicine in another faculty.

We support the further decentralization of medical education and hope that the university will follow the order of the Ministry of Education

The problem is not bad teachers, but that even then 116 students was too many. When you have up to ten students with the same patient, the quality of teaching suffers. It is all the more frustrating as we have realized in retrospect that many of the same problems and diagnoses we encountered at University Hospital can also be found elsewhere.

We find that some people believe that only university hospitals are good enough to train doctors. We think this is an old-fashioned and backward attitude. There are many good resources and relevant areas of learning outside the university city of Tromsø. We would actually say that the decentralized learning arenas are seen as more relevant than the University Hospital, as they give a broader picture of the healthcare system than what you get from spending six years in Tromsø. We prefer to meet many patients with common problems who are cared for in the primary health service and in local hospitals, rather than meeting a few patients with rare diseases in large groups of students at the university hospital.

Although the majority of students practice in other hospitals during their fifth year of study, we believe that an even greater part of the practical-clinical teaching could well take place in the other hospitals of the region and in the primary health care service. You don’t have to be in a university hospital to have a gynecological exam, listen to hearts, talk to children, or interpret electrocardiograms. For those who have to sit in the big city and doubt that there are relevant patients and good academic resources “out there”, and for those who don’t understand what geographic narcissism means, we recommend that you read the work of specialist psychologist Malin Fors (8).