UCL Medical School welcomes Ningbo delegation

In October, we welcomed colleagues from Ningbo University Medical School in China who are staying in London for 4 months. 

Our guests are all doctors who come from a wide range of clinical disciplines.  Ningbo University medical school offers a 5 year MBBS curriculum taught in English for both Chinese and international students.

Visiting for an extended period gives doctors from abroad an opportunity to really get to grips with the healthcare and medical education culture in the UK and at UCL.  It also has huge language skill benefits, and the improvement in everyone’s English in three months has been enormous.

The work we’ve been doing has centred on highlighting how our curriculum is run and how practice here can be implemented in China.  Medical students at UCL are taught in a way that integrates hands-on patient contact and experiences with the more traditional textbook-learning scientific background of medicine.

At UCL Medical School we train our medical students with an overarching vision, with an aim to producing the “UCL Doctor,” which we define as:
“A highly competent and scientifically literate clinician, equipped to practise patient-centred medicine in a constantly changing modern world, with a foundation in the basic medical and social sciences. This vision is underpinned by the values of scholarship, rigour and professionalism. The focus is on the development of the student as a scientifically informed, socially responsible professional who, in turn, can serve the health needs of individuals and communities.”

One aim is to help the Ningbo doctors define and shape and put into practice their vision of the sort of doctor that graduates from their medical school.

They are the first of what we hope will be many more groups of doctors to visit UCL and benefit from the exchange of cultures and ideas by observing our teaching programme. This is an exciting initiative and we hope to continue learning from our visitors and growing this new venture.

MSEC is an exciting venture for the medical school, and is discussed in more detail this month’s newsletter by John-george Nicholson, MSEC Business Manager.  As well as building closer links with Ningbo University, we are engaging with institutions around the world, including in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Burma, Poland and India.  The experience we have grown in international healthcare and medical education informs the programs we tailor make for each institution.  This lets UCL Medical School provide a customised consultancy experience for hospitals and healthcare organisations around the world.

More information on the programme for the visitors can be found on our website.