Ancient seat of learning goes modern: Durham university is expanding into gritty towns - Higher, Education - The Independent
The first two years of the joint medical degree that Durham runs in partnership with the University of Newcastle – one of Tony Blair's new medical schools – are taught in Stockton to 100 medics before they head off to Newcastle for clinical training.
The teaching is very innovative, he says. A lot of it is done not by medics but by people from the social sciences, anthropology and the biomedical sciences, something that is very hard to do in a conventional medical school. "It gives the students a very different experience," he says. "That's partly why we get a lot of applicants."
If you're a doctor who doesn't necessarily want to be, say, a glamorous neurosurgeon, but instead wants to know more about the social side of medicine, you might opt to take your first two years at Durham University. It is in these social aspects of medicine that expert bodies such as the World Health Organisation believe we need to improve because advances in medicine and knowledge about diet and lifestyle are not reaching people in the poorer, less healthy regions.
You get the impression that Higgins would like to build up a medical school in Durham that concentrates on training doctors who understand the politics and economics of health but is prevented from doing so by the formidable logistics of securing medical training places from the Government and medical establishment. In the meantime, he is working with Newcastle and developing research at Durham in health and wellbeing through, in particular, the Wolfson Research Institute, which concentrates on health and is run by a social scientist, and through the nascent Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
"At the moment in this country we are too focused on the question of how you cure ill people, rather than how you stop people getting ill in the first place – or at least catch things early so that you can deal with them early," says Higgins. "That research brings in people from the departments of English, philosophy and health, which very few universities can do. But Durham can, and certainly conventional medical schools can't."
