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The Food Programme: The Medical Field: Why student doctors are getting out on farms

20/06/2021

The Medical Field: Why student doctors are getting out on farms

BBC Radio 4 - The Food Programme, The Medical Field: Why student doctors are getting out on farms

Could teaching medics about food production help improve the nation's health?

Sheila Dillon joins a group of medical students on a farm visit, to discuss whether an education in food production could help them offer better nutritional support to patients

The Food Programme first met Iain Broadley and Ally Jaffee in 2017, when they were studying medicine in Bristol. 

The pair saw a disconnect between the rise of diet-related diseases, and the training they received around nutrition - with some students getting as little as eight hours of compulsory nutrition education during their entire time at medical school. So Ally and Iain founded Nutritank, an organisation championing better nutritional education for healthcare professionals, which earned them the Pat Llewellyn New Talent trophy at the 2019 BBC Food and Farming Awards.

Today Nutritank's active in more than 20 medical school societies across the UK, and has been part of a working group charged with finalising a new nutritional curriculum for medical schools, due out this autumn.

Now, they're piloting a scheme taking student and junior doctors out on farm visits - in a bid to better educate future healthcare professionals about food production and nutrition, so that they in turn can better advise their patients. 

So could it work? Sheila joins them on a farm visit to the Great Tew Estate in Oxfordshire, to find out. 

She also speaks to Kate Henderson from the estate's farm team, Liz Lake and Caroline Drummond from Linking Environment and Farming, and Dr Glenys Jones: a registered public health nutritionist and deputy chief executive of the Association for Nutrition.


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