Equality for people with disabilities in medicine

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7422.1051-b

BMJ 2003;327:1051 (1 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7422.1051-b

Letter

Equality for people with disabilities in medicine

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—The view of the General Medical Council in respectof students with disabilities going to medical school is crystalclear and very positive.

We believe that students with a wide range of disabilities can—andwe know that they do—successfully complete the medicalcurriculum. We would become concerned only in the rare instanceswhere public safety might be at risk. This is spelt out in Tomorrow'sDoctors.¹ Being in a wheelchair, for example, should not ofitself be a bar to studying medicine, and I am personally awareof one such student who recently began their medical studies.

I set this position out in the Career Focus of 18 October.²I was therefore surprised and disappointed by the editorialin the same issue of the BMJ³ because it gave the erroneousimpression that the GMC gets in the way of students with disabilitiesgoing to medical school—we don't. . . . [Full text of this article]

Peter Rubin, chairman

GMC Education Committee, General Medical Council, London W1N 6JE peter.rubin@nottingham.ac.uk

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Equality for people with disabilities in medicine: Stewart Mercer, Paul Dieppe, Ruth Chambers, and Rhona MacDonald
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