Hate blood but want a career in medicine? Don’t worry, there’s a job for you

Written by Ian Wilson, Professor, Associate Dean – Learning and Teaching at University of Wollongong.

Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do – but this often changes. uonottingham

Just before I finished high school, my local general practitioner suggested I consider medicine. But the thought of blood made me feel squeamish, so I went to university to do maths and physics, and to try the new field of computer science. Needing a fourth subject, I opted for biology so that my friend who also did biology could give me a lift to campus.

I ended up becoming fascinated with biology, so much so that I wanted to study neuroscience, and I felt the best way into a research career was through medicine. Luckily, I was successful. As an undergraduate I discovered patients and shifted my focus to a career as a psychiatrist.

I was called up for National Service and ended up on a Defence Force Scholarship. During this time I became interested in trauma surgery and after discharge joined the surgical training scheme. After six months of surgery, I was bored with the technical side but still enjoyed the patient contact and interaction. Being married with one child and another on the way, I opted for general practice with a mental health and procedural focus.

I tell this story in some detail to highlight the meanderings that many students undertake in their career decision-making. Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do and spend their time achieving that goal.

But the majority are more like me and develop multiple interests. Where they end up generally depends on a number of factors such as available training posts, skill levels, controllability of lifestyle and to a very small extent, salary.

The Medical Schools Outcome Database and Longitudinal Tracking Project (MSOD) asks students about their career intentions on entry to and exit from medical school, and as interns (their first year working in a hospital) and residents (their second year of work). On entry to medical school in 2011, 25% of medical students had a first preference for surgery with paediatrics and general practice the next most frequent.

The preferences of those exiting medical school in 2011 were a little different: internal medicine and surgery were the most common career choices (18% each) followed by general practice and then paediatrics. Towards the end of the internship, the preferences changed again, with internal medicine the most frequently chosen (19%) followed by general practice and then surgery.

The least preferable career options tend to be rehabilitation, public health and palliative care – most students come into medicine to save lives, making these specialities less appealing.

With the growing number of medical graduates and the relative shortage of intern and specialist training positions, we have noticed a change in student behaviour.

Increasingly, students are attempting to ensure their undergraduate experiences provide them with the best advantage for their career selection process. Honours degrees or the publication of papers will add a few extra points in some speciality selection processes and students are working hard to achieve these goals.

Hospital choice is also seen as important, as there is a perception among medical students that undertaking an internship in a specific hospital increases their chances of being selected into a specific specialist training program. But these beliefs aren’t necessarily based on facts.

Some experts have suggested using career counselling to increase the number of students entering careers that are less appealing or where there are significant shortages. But there’s no evidence to show career counselling works in this way.

The best way to deal with this issue is around student selection and undergraduate experiences. Choosing students who are more likely to enter a given profession and providing them with experiences that are positive will work much more effectively in promoting careers in the generalist professions (medicine, surgery and rural general practice).

But often the impact of changes does not stop at the school level. Many professionals, including doctors, invest so much of their time and energy into their careers they are surprised that their practice takes on a sameness. Once you have delivered 200 babies or conducted 100 gall bladder operations the procedures lose their excitement.

This is the point at which many doctors start looking for something new and engage in medical politics, education, research, business ventures or artistic endeavours.

Some, like me, become dissatisfied with individual care and want to have a bigger impact on the world. Moving into academia to train the next cohorts of doctors seemed a logical step. In light of my original interest in research, this was a hugely positive for me.

Originally posted on The Conversation

Reading from the screen – Young children’s digital literacy

By Dr Lisa Kervin and Dr Jessica Mantei, Language and Literacies, Faculty of Education and members of the Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute (IERI).

Digital reading, or reading from a computer screen, may seem like second nature to many adults, but what challenges face young children when they read digitally?

Literature examining how children learn to read is plentiful, but there is little literature that discusses young children’s ability to read digitally, which is fundamentally different from the act of reading traditional print based texts.

To address this gap in the literature, we are working in collaboration with Jan Hutton, Michelle Rodwell and Kristy Kervin from the Catholic Diocese Office in Wollongong, and Grant Elmers from Creative Arts (UOW), to design an assessment tool to capture information from early readers, focusing in particular on Kindergarten and Year 1. Initially, the team analysed the “Concepts about Print” assessment (Clay, 1972), a well-respected assessment tool in the literacy field. We identified the under lying principles of assessment and determined which of those principles could be transferred to a digital environment. Next a tool was designed which took the form of a webpage. Professor Don Leu (University of Connecticut), reviewed the tool, providing critical feedback. After making some further refinements the webpage was trialled in the classroom.

Initial findings have proven interesting. When the children looked at the site one of the first questions they were asked is, “what do you notice?” Interestingly, every child focused on something different when initially looking at the screen. This has given a small indication of just how difficult and demanding it can be to read in a digital environment. Further funding for this project is being sought, so as to continue to refine the instrument while working with teachers to see how discoveries made might be applied to transform classroom pedagogies.

This article was originally published in the Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute Newsletter Issue 6, Winter 2012.

The focus on obesity is not so healthy

By Professor Jan Wright and Associate Professor Valerie Harwood of UOW’s Faculty of Education & Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute.

 

The Australia government has made and is continuing to make substantial investments in policies, strategies and research to address the perceived risk of obesity and related health issues. We argue that obesity is a complex issue and there are very real disconcerting effects of the widespread preoccupation with obesity as a major public health issue. Obesity is not a neutral concept. It is tied to moral and ideological beliefs about fatness. These beliefs are evident both in depictions of obesity in the media and in the ready subscription to moralistic ways of recognizing and dealing with obesity as a public concern. Our research in schools points to the way obesity has become the emblem of ill-health; children believe they can evaluate health simply by looking to see who is fat.

The preoccupation with childhood obesity drives major policy initiatives on health, and schools in particular have been targeted for the implementation of a plethora of initiatives geared towards helping children and young people lose weight, become more active, and change their eating patterns in and outside school. Young people (and their guardians, including schools) are implicitly held personally responsible and accountable for the prevention of obesity and related health problems, by knowing and avoiding relevant ‘risk’ factors. This emphasis on individual responsibility ignores the complexities and different opportunities that people have to make ‘healthy’ choices’. Much of the epidemiological research on overweight and obesity points to its greater prevalence of overweight and obesity amongst populations that are socially and economically disadvantaged. Research by Pickett and colleagues, for example, suggest that countries with the greatest gap between the rich and the poor have the highest level of obesity.

These inequalities point to the importance of structural changes to improve the health of all. For example, we would argue that in relation to physical activity government should be promoting a social justice approach rather than an approach that blames the individual for not being healthy (for not being the right weight), particularly when those individuals are the most vulnerable in society. An intensified focus on obesity can create further social divisions as body size becomes a source of stigma, discrimination and shame. Our research reveals stark contrasts between the facilities and resources for physical activity and physical education in government schools, particularly those in poorer areas, compared to private schools.  For the young people in these government schools, school is often the main and often the only opportunity they have for physical activity. In their communities, access in terms of places to play, transport, and costs as well as their other commitments to family preclude participation in physical activity outside of school.  

We suggest that government funds need to directed toward changing the substantive causes of health inequalities, rather than a one dimensional focus that situates obesity front and centre and holds individuals solely responsible for their health and lifestyle ‘choices’.

Professor Jan Wright and Associate Professor Valerie Harwood have recently had their highly successful book “Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’: Governing Bodies” republished in paperback.

Photo: Goran Kuzmanovski | Dreamstime.com

Academic snobbery: local historians need more support

Written by Ian Willis, Honorary Fellow at University of Wollongong.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo: Flickr/Kate’s Photo Diary

 

Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian.

While some academic historians engage with local history, sadly there is an entrenched snobbery from the academy. From the other side, the enthusiastic amateur is too wound up with a parochial approach to local history and often doesn’t see the bigger picture.

If both sides can engage with each other, the result would be a better type of history practise and a greater contribution to the story of Australia.

What’s wrong with Science education?

By Dr Wendy Nielsen, Faculty of Education

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a science educator, I am sometimes asked, why do our kids have trouble learning science? The related question is, ‘what is wrong with science education?’ These questions may reflect an echo from a media story or an education minister’s complaint about weak science knowledge or PISA results posted by our students. Most often, they reflect the questioner’s personal memory of how science was learned (perhaps from the perspective of one who was successful at learning science). The predominant experience and/or memory for most people is from their own high school science classrooms, where students sat in rows and copied notes that were either written by the teacher or recited in a lecture style. You too may ask, well, what is the problem with that? Those that can, will learn the information, and those that can’t, well, they don’t really need to, because they aren’t going to be scientists anyway.

The problem is that this is a 1960s attitude toward the nature of science knowledge: science as a field of study weeds out the best students so that they will be trained as scientists. Science is important for all students because they learn about how societal understandings have been built over human history, including the structure of knowledge; the bases for evidence and logical argument; a critical ability to question claims (made across all sectors of society); an open view of the nature of knowledge and how new knowledge is built; a passing fluency with the big discussions that have historically puzzled humans and human ingenuity; a foundational ability to contribute to discussions about big issues, involving for example, the environment, land and resource management, agriculture, urban infrastructure, transportation and communications, to name just a few. In short, learning science teaches students about how to think and how to inquire into problems. A population that is a) unable, or, b) unwilling, to engage with these and other issues that have science knowledge at their core is impoverished and retrospective, rather than innovative, entrepreneurial and future-oriented and, further, lacks the capacity for problem-setting, let along problem-solving.

Jason Wilson: Social Media, Political Tragics and the Future of the Journalism

[Jason gave the 26th May Uni in the Brewery presentation at Five Islands Brewery (Wollongong)]

Currently there are extensive public discussions about the “future of journalism”, with many concerns about the impact of new technologies on the bottom line of media businesses. With classified advertising going online, and a range of platforms allowing anyone to share news or be a commentator, many fear that the days of professional journalism are numbered. I will be presenting on this topic as part of the Uni in the Brewery Series on Wednesday 26 May, 5.30pm at the Five Islands Brewery, Wollongong. In this talk I will suggest that the relationship between new media and traditional media; journalists and the “political tragics” who are the keenest producers of user-generated content can actually be complementary. Indeed, the uses of platforms like Twitter suggest that they bring people together around broadcasting and mainstream media products, creating a whole new kind of audience for journalistic output.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog post.