More than 500 would-be doctors apply for just 60 places

MORE than 500 late vocation aspiring doctors have applied for the 60 graduate entry medical school places being made available from next September at the University of Limerick (UL) and the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.

UL was last month nominated by the Department of Education as the lead graduate entry school of medicine in the country, getting 108 of the 240 places which will be available each year from 2010.

The other places have been divided among existing medical faculties at other colleges.

UL will take in its first 30 students in September and build its total to 108 over the next three years.

Twelve non-EU students will also be offered places each year.

The college has just completed an agreement which will enable it to offer the most advanced medicine curriculum in the world.

Professor Paul Finucane, who heads the new UL faculty, said it will be one of only five colleges in the world offering students the St George’s University, London, course in medicine.

Prof Finucane said: “We are finalising the agreement and we will complete it by the end of this month. This curriculum is world-class and St George’s, in turn, got it from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Three medical colleges in Australia use it, so UL will be one of five internationally making it available to medical students.”

Work on a new €15 million faculty will take two years to complete and, in the meantime, students will be housed in temporary accommodation.

Prof Finucane said a further €13m will be spent on developing student facilities at the 10 acute hospitals which will be affiliated to the new UL faculty.

He said: “The Mid-Western Regional is going to need a state-of-the-art clinical sciences building for our students. At the moment, we are in negotiations with the Health Service Executive on this development on the Dooradoyle site. We will have clinical teaching also going on in the Regional Maternity Hospital, at St John’s, Croom, orthopaedic along with Ennis and Nenagh. We will also have teaching hospitals in Kilkenny, Tullamore and Mullingar. All of these hospitals will require infrastructure to teach our students.”

The UL medicine course will be the shortest available in this country, lasting four years.

The first two years will be spent on the UL campus.

“After that, the students will spend years three and four in the clinical teaching sciences in various hospitals,” said Prof Finucane.

Six months of the final two years of clinical training will be provided in general practice primary care.

Prof Finucane said: “This is something that is highly innovative not just at a national level, but internationally. There is a need to get medical education out of an exclusive hospital setting into general practice primary care and give students that experience as well.”

To achieve this, UL will link up with GP networks in the Mid-West, Kerry, Carlow/Kilkenny and in the Midlands.

UL was selected last month by the Department of Education to provide the lead graduate entry school of medicine in Ireland.

Prof Finucane, who has been appointed the foundation head of the school of medicine, said that recruitment of academic, clinical, administrative and technical staff was well advanced.

“We have been preparing for this since 2004 and we are hitting the ground running,” he said.

The first students are being selected following a massive response to the course.

As well as having an honours degree, potential entrants must undergo the Graduate Australian Medical School Admission Test (GAMSAT).

Students sat the GAMSAT two weeks ago in Cork and Dublin.