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FINLAND

Basic medical education

There is a shortage of doctors; and especially of GPs. To help this problem, Minister of Education (background: nurse) made a proposal that medical schools should offer a parallel track in BME. This track would be offered for nurses only, and it should be individually tailored. Nurses could already be committed to stay at their working places (even in the countryside) and they could remain as doctors there after qualification. Two of our five faculties had to plan this track already six months ago. They rejected the idea as very expensive and not helping. According to European rules the education should be long enough, not only 4 years as had been suggested. In addition, a shortage of nurses is proposed to come in the very near future as well.

During this fall the discussion started again, the last three faculties are now “ordered” to make these plans; and there seems to be a political decision already done, this idea has to be implemented.

A heated debate concerning this issue is going on, among trade unions, faculties, students, citizens, officials etc. Are nurses educated to doctors or not, the annual medical student intake was anyhow increased considerably already this fall, and no sufficient resources were given to faculties,

Specialist education

The shortage of GPs reflects also on specialist education of all disciplines. There has been a rule since five years that trainees on all specialties should have half a year's training in primary health care within their training scheme. This has an educational background, when the residencies are included in the BME period in Finland.

Now the government has decided this obligatory period of training in primary health care should be prolonged to nine months concerning all specialties. It can easily be guessed, this will not be easy. There is discussions going on, concerning in which phase in every specialty this kind of obligatory PHC training should be included. It is not even unambiguous for GPs even: what do we do with these nine months' visitors when we have personal doctor view on general practice.

CME

As we have problems with health care today in Finland, no new resources has been given for CME either, even on the doctors' contracts there are recommendations concerning this. The national high-level committees, aimed to solve the problems in our current health care, which gave their statements in April, put a lot of emphasis on organising CME with employers' finances. This far not much development has happened. Still Finnish doctors are eager to educate themselves.