Starting next year, the number of medical students will be drastically reduced, reports Reem Leila The State Council Administrative Court has ordered the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) and Universities Supreme Council (USC) to cut the enrollment of medical students by 60 per cent. Hamdi El-Sayed, head of the People's Assembly Health Committee and of the Doctors' Syndicate, first raised concerns over deteriorating teaching standards in medical faculties six years ago. Given the available facilities and resources, he argued, no more than 3,000 students should be accepted annually. He subsequently filed a case against the MOHE, which has regularly accepted more than 10,000 students a year to study medicine. Ten days ago the State Council Administrative Court judged in his favour. This year's intake of more than 10,000 medical students will be exempted from the ruling. It will begin to be applied in 2008/2009, when numbers will be restricted to 4,000 students nationwide. El-Sayed attributes the alarming increase in complaints against medical practitioners to inadequately taught courses and a failure on the part of the Ministry of Health and Population (MOHP) to then provide post graduate follow-up training. "There has been an absence of sound planning and the decision [to increase student numbers] was randomly taken." El-Sayed has accused the minister of higher education of taking a "political stand to assuage the thousands of students who got high grades and then wanted to join medical faculties" while ignoring the way this would impact on the quality of teaching and the job prospects of new graduates. Sara Mustafa, a medical student who graduated two years ago, remembers her university years as a "mixture of struggling and pleasure". "I still remember how happy I was to be accepted by the medical faculty, and then what a struggle it was fighting my way into a lecture hall packed with hundreds of students. Certainly the weight of numbers had a detrimental effect on training." Mustafa, who works as a general practitioner at a small private hospital, feels her university education could have done more to equip her to meet the demands of her current job. Ali Hassan Abadi, former head of Research and Development at the Medical Education and Health Services Centre, suggests an alternative approach. "Instead of limiting the number of students accepted nationwide more medical faculties should be established with more efficient training geared towards meeting market needs," he says. El-Sayed disagrees. "Creating more faculties will only lead to further crowding of the medical market and greater erosion of the quality of services on offer." A meeting between the MOHE and members of USC will be held ahead of the next school year to fix the regulations governing admission to Egypt's medical faculties. Saleh El-Shemy, head of Shura Council Health Committee, concedes that the quality of teaching in medical schools has deteriorated. "It is a vicious circle," he says. "Professors do not have the time to give each student the attention he or she deserves. As a consequence the students who move on to graduate and post-graduate studies are already mediocre because of their incomplete undergraduate education." Many professors let these students pass and gradually the standard deteriorates even further. "I consider the Administrative Court's ruling the wisest verdict." El-Shemy points to another problem in the current system. The syllabus, he says, is in need of a radical overhaul yet the teaching commitments of university professors -- many of whom are obliged to teach up to eight hours daily, leaves them no time, let alone energy, to undertake the necessary revisions.
