The Beersheva Experiment
Would we prefer to have a different kind of doctor? Are our medical students being trained in the wrong way? In a daring experiment in Israel, our conventional ideas of medical education are being challenged. At the Beersheva Medical School, founded four years ago, the training draws upon the sympathy and concern that motivated these students to want to be a doctor in the first place.
The film shows the way the school works through the experience of some of its students. From the very first day, the course throws them into contact with patients. Amit, Nir and Aviva, first-year students, became totally involved in ' old people medicine ' and find bureaucratic as well as medical problems - an old lady who had broken her leg twice fell because she couldn't get her glasses mended. Saadi, in his fourth year, is unable to prevent the death of a child because her father followed the advice of a traditional faith healer.
If the school succeeds, the implications will be particularly strong for the UK, for the training seems amazingly well suited to produce the GPS on whom our health service depends.
Narrator PAUL VAUGHAN
Film editor MICHAEL RIGG
Editor SIMON CAMPBELL-JONES
Written and produced by EDWARD GOLDWYN