Medical boards push for student expulsion rule changes

The eight Dutch medical examination boards want to increase the legal possibilities of removing underperforming students from programmes. This involves students who repeatedly display unprofessional behaviour, systematically arrive late, and don’t take feedback seriously, the chairmen of the boards said in the Dutch Journal of Medicine, reports NL Times.

In 2010, a legal regulation was implemented to expel medical students who exhibit “morally reprehensible behaviour”. But the Iudicium Abeundi (IA) almost always fails in practice because the accusers have to prove that the student violated patient safety. “We have to meet impossible requirements to collect the burden of proof,” said Mario Maas, chair of the National Consultation on Chairs of Examination Boards of Medicine (LOVEC).

In its 12-year existence, the IA procedure has only been used successfully three times. All three cases involved concrete violations of the rules of conduct. One student sent sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old patient. Another repeatedly used an authoritarian tone towards patients. And the third threatened to distribute revealing selfies of his ex in the hospital where she worked.
Full report on the NL Times site