Department of Medicine (Post-baccalaureate)

Post-baccalaureate

 

In the US, few medical schools accept high school graduates, instead these schools often require a bachelor’s degree prior to applying for medical education. Just as physicians and doctors share the same vocabulary in English, Americans believe that they also share the same meaning. In other words, physicians are doctors.

In the 1980s, medical schools in Taiwan started to take in students with a bachelor’s degree, in the hope of adding more talents from other fields to the medical world. However, this program ended up unsuccessful. Most of the students taken in were those from medicine-related department (which means this system became a second shot for students who failed to make it to medical schools in their exam) or the poor. As a result, many medical schools shut down the program in the end, except for Kaoshiung Medical University.

Perhaps, medical schools can target students from the remote areas of Taiwan, such as eastern Taiwan and the outlying islands, so as to let the graduates return to their homelands and provide medical services for the local. This could be the solution to the doctor-lacking problem of these places.