Gozo has been chosen as the location for the prestigious new medical school to be set up in Malta by the Queen Mary University of London.
The school will also require Maltese hospital staff to provide teaching in the latter years of the course.
A Memorandum of Understanding was recently signed between the health and education ministries and the Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry – the medical and dental school of the university.
This will elevate the status of Gozo’s hospital to a teaching hospital and earn it international acclaim
The agreement to open a medical school in Malta was announced on Wednesday during a public consultation meeting with the Health Minister.
In 2008 UK government research ranked Barts first in London for quality of its medical research and fourth country-wide.
“Barts are highly interested in setting up the medical school at the Gozo General Hospital. This will elevate the status of the Gozo hospital to a teaching hospital and earn it international acclaim,” a spokesman for the Health Ministry said.
There had been several attempts to achieve this in the past, the spokesman noted. “No doubt the presence of a medical school in Gozo will further boost the prosperity of our sister island,” he said.
A spokesman for Queen Mary said the MoU was signed to facilitate closer collaboration in the health sciences field.
The principal aim, he said, would be to set up a higher education institution in Malta focusing on health sciences.
This would be a Queen Mary University institution, with Queen Mary staff providing teaching for the early years of study and Maltese hospital staff providing clinical teaching in the last three years of the course.
The main programme would be a jointly delivered MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) degree, plus a pre-medical year with the Gozo General Hospital.
The curriculum would correspond with the existing MBBS programme in London, with the expectation that staff and student exchanges or transfers would be undertaken.
However, the Malta Medical Students’ Association has expressed concern that the new medical school will compromise their job opportunities.
It also raised questions about whether the current health sector infrastructure was strong enough to support a new private medical school, and whether the entry requirements and final qualifications would be any different from those of the existing medical school.
The association said the existing medical school already hosted 650 students – a number whom it said had doubled in a decade.
The existing school recently added a Maltese proficiency test for all international students to meet the needs of patients who felt more comfortable expressing themselves in Maltese. Will this be a requirement for international students in the course on the new campus, the association asked.
Another issue faced by medical students was the limited number of Malta Foundation Programme posts offered to new graduates.
Some 100 posts had been offered to the class graduating this year – merely enough to provide a job for all of them. With the class graduating in 2019 currently having about 190 students, the association expressed concern that a good proportion of them would not be offered a job in Malta.
Will the introduction of a new medical school further compromise the chances of these hard working medical students getting a job within the foundation programme, the association asked.