Challenges & opportunities--Graduate Entry Medicine (GEM)

Graduate Entry Medicine (GEM) provides both challenges and opportunities for students and teachers alike. These are global issues for Ireland and the UK which are gaining in momentum and synergy with medical education in the USA. They provide an important chance to revisit the tenets of a good doctor and how best to select students for training from an enormous pool of potential applicants. In the UK and Ireland there is a move to Graduate Entry Medicine (GEM) courses to supplement the number of doctor being trained from traditional undergraduate courses mainly populated by school leavers. This is in alignment with the USA where all students are graduate entry and so come to the course with learning in another subject which may or may not be directly related and also life skills and perhaps the experience of working in another profession. For the researcher the big question is; "Do GEM courses lead to better doctors or not?" An ancillary question at time of a global shortage of doctors with its increasing health economy is; "Will GEM aid recruitment to the profession, but more importantly retention?"