News

The BMA has today published a charter for medical schools to prevent and address racial harassment.

The Medical Schools Council welcomes this guidance for medical students on racial harassment. MSC plans to use the helpful recommendations in the report in our ongoing work to support medical schools in addressing the issue of the ethnic award gap. One key aspect of this work is ensuring that the learning environment is supportive to all learners, no matter what their background is. Improved reporting mechanisms for racial harassment will help students feel supported and help medical schools to take action to improve the education and training they provide.

In 2020 MSC will hold engagement events with medical students from across the UK to get their views on how the ethnic award gap can be improved. As well as looking at reporting systems we will ask for their views on a number issues including whether they feel medical schools should provide bystander training to all students, whether the medical school curriculum needs to be diversified and their own ideas of what could be improved within medical schools to tackle the award gap. MSC will also continue to bring together medical schools to share best practise and ideas for addressing differential attainment.

Individual medical schools will need to decide whether to officially sign up to the charter in discussion with their students; MSC, as a membership organisation cannot make this decision for them.

The full guidance can be found here.

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Notes to editors

1. The Medical Schools Council represents the interests and ambitions of UK medical schools as they relate to the generation of national health, wealth and knowledge through biomedical research and the profession of medicine. For further information about the work of the Medical Schools Council please see www.medschools.ac.uk.

2. For more information about this press release please contact Fahmida Yasmin, Senior Communications Officer, on 020 7419 5430 or fahmida.yasmin@medschools.ac.uk.