The work of the student doctor: a pilot project

The primary task of the student doctor in the third year of medical school is to inquire into problems of illness, in co-operation with patients, house officers and other staff. This is a new kind of work for most medical students, who have spent the previous two years reading textbooks and listening to lectures. How do students get out of these passive forms of learning into active inquiry? How do they learn to work co-operatively with other people in the technical difficulty and emotional upheaval of illness? We know that most medical students somehow manage to become practicing physicians, but we have known very little about this critical transition. We would expect that this phase of training, like any major transition in the life cycle, leads to great strain and the formation of new patterns of thinking and behaviour that will last through a lifetime of clinical practice. These considerations lead directly to practical matters of medical education and research. How can we best study this critical period? How can we offer the best education to student doctors forming working relationships with patients? This paper describes a working model of training and research to meet these concerns, adapted from the work of Michael Balint and colleagues in the ‘G.P. (General Practitioner) Seminars’( Balint, 1954, 1957 ; Bourne, 1975 ).