Human tissue bill has impact on professional examinations

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7444.898-a

BMJ 2004;328:898 (10 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7444.898-a

Letter

Human tissue bill has impact on professional examinations

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

EDITOR—I endorse the views and concerns expressed by Furnessand Sullivan on whether the draft human tissue bill will achievean appropriate balance between the rights of individuals andthe benefits to society of the use of human materials.¹ Thepracticality of monitoring consent for all patients is a majorconcern, and observations of our own attempts to do this byusing a combination of a separate section on the consent formand a declaration on the laboratory request form indicate, despitea huge effort by the laboratories, that this is not a reliableway of recording patients' views.

One aspect of the use of human tissue that has not receivedmuch attention is in professional examinations. The examinationsof the Royal College of Pathologists provide a critical appraisalof candidates' abilities to recognise disease processes in bloodsamples, cytology specimens, and tissue biopsy samples. Theexaminers take . . . [Full text of this article]

Timothy R Helliwell, reader in pathology

Department of Pathology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GA trh{at}liv.ac.uk