Mums in medicine

Desperate mothers

Fortunately, they have proved unfounded-it most certainly was a good time, and I wasn't the only one there with kids. Within minutes, we had magically migrated towards each other and discovered that we weren't alone in these thoughts. But there were only two of us. Perhaps naively, both of us had assumed that a course aimed at graduates would be more geared up to dealing with people with families.

By definition, graduates are older than your standard medical student. Nationally, acceptances of mature students, defined as students over the age of 25, have increased from 2.8% in 1996 to 8.2% in 2003 (see www.ucas.org). At St George's, about a quarter of student admissions in 2003 were mature students, compared with 5% in 1996. About two thirds are women. Increasingly, at St George's anyway, many of these students have, or would like to start, families.

In countries such as Australia, where graduate entry courses have been running for several years, students with children account for over 5% of the student population (www.flinders.edu.au). Medical schools have worked to develop relevant welfare strategies. It was quite a surprise to realise that we were the first two mothers to follow the graduate entry programme-we were part of the third intake. We were soon asking questions …