Medical role models

Thank you for highlighting the critical "shortage of medical academics" (News, June 10).

I am a supporter of the International Campaign to Revitalise Academic Medicine (Icram) and a member of the UK working group looking at competence in academic public health. At the most senior levels, joint pressures of the research assessment exercise, research work and health policy consultancy on academic "esteem" mean that students and postgraduate trainees have very little educational contact with the most experienced academics. But experience of inspiring and challenging role models plays a key part in persuading young clinicians to work in higher education. The relative scarcity of female and ethnic minority professors may make academic life seem even more remote to many students. Face-to-face teaching has to be valuable and valued, even for the most august professors.

Medical teaching is dispersed over a wider range of settings, and this is crucial for imparting specific skills in practice and good professional standards of behaviour. However, this means that most initial learning in students' future work environments now involves part-time medical teachers who have many other duties (health service, management and professional development). A lot of these frontline educators have no formal training or support for this role. The staying power needed to retain these teachers could come from the learning support and peer networks the Higher Education Academy has instigated through its subject centre for medicine at Newcastle University.

The Heads of Medical Schools may be correct that it is lonely at the top, but there is no need for fledgling academics to feel lonely at the bottom.

Woody Caan
Professor of public health
Anglia Polytechnic University