It is urgent to have “a referee” on the reform of entry into health studies, and “we don’t have it today”regretted Benoît Veber, co-president of the conference of deans of medicine, on Thursday, September 12. During a back-to-school press conference, the dean of the Rouen faculty recalled, for the second year in a row, the consequences deemed worrying of the creation, in 2020, of two new access routes, the specific health access pathway (PASS) and the multiple licenses with health access option (L.AS).
These renovated courses had ended the first common preparatory year for health studies (Paces). The aim was to diversify the profiles of students and to demonstrate the contribution, in addition to health studies, of parallel training in another degree capable of enriching the skills of future practitioners who will encounter very different human situations, faced with the challenges of chronic diseases, the aging of the population or the revolution of artificial intelligence.
“We want to simplify and make access to health studies more readable. Currently, it is not readable, except for a specialist”continued the dean, recalling that the Minister of Higher Education, Sylvie Retailleau, had ruled out the hypothesis of a new “reform on reform”.
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The conference of deans proposes that universities choose a single training path: either that of the “all L.AS” offer or that of the PASS with the possibility of integrating a L.AS only in the second year and not from the first year, in order to maintain this “second step” introduced by the reform which allows rejected students to retry the competition one or two years later, in L.AS 2 or L.AS 3.
“The promotions are heterogeneous”
Another aspiration of the deans: that those admitted to the second year of medicine, pharmacy, midwifery and dentistry have benefited from the same volume of teaching in biomedical subjects. Currently, “The promotions are heterogeneous”with students from the PASS having benefited from four hundred hours and those from the different L.AS who only had one hundred. The repeat rate of L.AS is between 30% and 40% while that of students from PASS is almost zero.
Finally, the conference wants “resolve the problem of interclassification of different L.AS” that the health faculties approach very differently and without students understanding how they were separated. For Benoît Veber, the only solution would be to establish a common test for all L.AS on a course in a biomedical discipline.
