HAHHA! That report not surprisingly, sort of sounds remarkably Irish. They do address particular concerns which do need to be considered, but can be very self-deprecating as well.
1) Poor clinical education: I'm not sure how this manifests within our learning. We have our clinicals and no one is left standing in an abyss because there's no faculty...you're given tutorials by interns, SHO's, reg's and consultants (mainly in OPD or during surgery). I don't know what they qualify as "full-time clinician" either, since the number of full-timers in just James's alone would amount to way over 32 people.
2) Bullying - This also depends what they mean by bullying. Does it mean making changes to curriculum without student input? Does it mean profs actually being mean to students in a classroom or private situation? We had a prof who always told us we'd kill our patients. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it hammers the point home that you need to know your stuff. I can only think of one consultant who says off-kilter things to students, and US students probably get a lot more pimping than we do. I've not really encountered "bullying" but the thing with that is, you can only be bullied if you let yourself be bullied.
3) There supposedly is a lack of funding, due to government cutbacks (ties into a lot of social and economic history that I don't really understand), but again...I don't really see it manifesting. All I see within college, and not just within the health sciences department, are plans and the starting of renovations / improvements to all facilities. In the hospital where we're lectured, they've put in 2 computer labs within the last 1.5 years. It'd be nice if they wouldn't schedule all-day classes in them, and yeah, we'd like more computers, but the demands are rising so quickly that it'd be very short-sighted to say they're failing to innovate.
4) That's an interesting one. I wonder with respect to what are they comparing it with? To be honest, I thought they were more focused on preventative care than in the US. Both are changing thinking and approach rapidly, but this actually was one of the reasons why I came here. My particular interest is in sports, and I was surprised when I came here the first time, how much focus was in the prevention of injury (because of a more dominant PT field here) rather than on the US "we'll fix it when it's broken" attitude. The same goes with lectures on diabetes, obesity, etc. and there's some health science student involvement in trying to change primary school education to include preventative measures for later diseases (cardiopulmonary, obesity, etc.) . I haven't obviously sat through US teaching, and it could have changed in the last 3 years, but I think they're more on the ball with prevention than in the US. Not sure on primary care, as I have nothing to compare it with.
5) Yeah, they are overly dependent on foreign student income.
6) I wouldn't worry about substandard education. That's not really a concern of any of us here, and each year, most (those who don't stay here) US / North Americans match successfully into good programs. We take our own measures to make sure we meet the requirements to be on an equal footing with US students (i.e. for the USMLE and stuff) and haven't found Irish education to be particularly lacking. In some ways, the different system of Irish and UK education works to our advantage.
