Bulletin board

Bolton tells students: start now

Bolton Institute is inviting students who didn’t get onto courses at the beginning of the academic year to enrol for a Degree or Diploma course at the beginning of the New Year.

“Effectively, this saves a whole year and is particularly important to students who may have had to take time off for health, financial or other personal reasons”, explains Mollie Temple, principal of Bolton Institute. “We pioneered the second semester option with almost 20 first degrees in built environment, textiles and engineering subjects in our Faculty of Technology. We found that as many as 15% of our student intake came through this popular route, and we have now expanded the second semester option to include a much wider choice across all Faculties.”

Leicester medical students go shopping

The new Leicester-Warwick medical school welcomed its first students to the Warwick campus this autumn and promptly kicked them out the door to their first lesson – in a shopping precinct. The 67 students were dropped in groups in various parts of Coventry and were given details of various fictitious families (for example, a family of nine with a weekly food allowance of £75); the student’s task was to explore and understand the social, economic and cultural factors which could have a bearing on patients’ health and nutrition.

Exploring the shopping areas was one part of their task to help them understand some of the issues affecting nutrition, from being able to get to the shops, to being able to buy food within budget. As Kelly Davey, one of the students put it, “It’s all well and good trying to treat a lady with anaemia, but if she has not got access to the right food then it is not going to help her.”

The Leicester-Warwick course is a graduate entry programme with an emphasis on practical work in the community. Clare Blackburn, senior lecturer at the medical school, explained the course’s guiding principles. “Doctors in the future should be much more understanding of people’s situations and the difficulties they face in trying to look after their health. They should be very much more socially aware and more able to deal with everyday health problems”, she said.

MSc Complementary Medicine: bridging the divide

A new modular MSc, in Complementary Medicine, will be available at QMUC from January 2001, aiming to bridge the divide between conventional and complementary medicine (CM). Concentrating on research methodology and its application to CM, it is designed to carry forward the debate on the integration of medicine.

Alongside this, students, who will primarily be people with experience of or currently employed in clinical sites, will be given a recognised training in a complementary therapy: either aromatherapy, homeopathy or reflexology. The MSc aims to explore and enlarge the research base of the therapies and to explore the therapeutic relationship and the influence of the ‘self’ in practice.