Symptoms of medical malaise 1

I am horrified that medical schools may be compensated for losses in their teaching grants provided they take students with lower-grade A levels ("Losers could regain grants", THES , August 22).

To deliberately select medical students on the grounds they are less able than those who have perfect A-level scores is certainly not in the medical interests of patients.

I write not only as a medical graduate and quondam lecturer in a medical school but as a chronically sick hospital patient. Has anyone asked what the general public or patients think? I suspect not. A much more worthy aim would be ending the continuing bias against women in medicine, which has quietly been forgotten.

Nigel T. James
Retired senior lecturer
University of Sheffield