We certainly need medics capable of passing the PLAB exam!

Tony




                      Lyndsay Rees-Jones
                      <lyndsay.rees-jones@CI        To:       [log in to unmask]
                      LIP.ORG.UK>                   cc:
                      Sent by: Chartered            Subject:  Re: PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO ASYLUM SEEKERS & REFUGEES
                      Library and
                      Information
                      Professionals
                      <[log in to unmask]
                      .UK>


                      24/01/03 10:12
                      Please respond to
                      Chartered Library and
                      Information
                      Professionals






Tony

Thank you for sharing this experience.  It's really good to learn about
something so positive when we are inundated with doom and gloom stories
about asylum seekers, in the press and on the news.

After all we need more medics - don't we?

Lyndsay
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Lyndsay Rees-Jones
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CILIP
020 7255 0500
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-----Original Message-----
From: Tony McSean [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 24 January 2003 10:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO ASYLUM SEEKERS & REFUGEES


Not strictly relevant to the thread but maybe of interest, the BMA library
now finds itself doing quite a bit of work with refugee doctors.  The BMA
now gives free membership to doctors who are refugees and not yet on the UK
medical register.  In practice this means a weekly copy of the BMJ, advice
from the local BMA office on registration and other matters - and use of
library services.  For most refugee doctors the priority is to study for
their PLAB exams (language and clinical knowledge, run by the GMC) and a
significant number of those with easy access to central London have use our
reading room as a study and meeting place.

We have not had the resources to make special stock provision for them, but
readers' service staff have put a significant amount of time into making
sure our refugees get the best out of the facilities we have to offer.  Our
collection anyway includes a lot of exam-support material, and we can
supply decent bandwidth on the internet terminals.  Although we've made no
special efforts to do this, it's clear that for many of our refugees the
library has played a significant role in helping them adapt to life in the
UK - if only because it is one of very few institutions where they meet a
wholehearted welcome and where they get treated as something other than a
problem in search of a solution.

I was actually quite worried when the new category of membership was
proposed without, as I saw it, the library getting the extra resources we
would need to deal with a new population of members.  PLAB students do not
have the best of reputations in many medical libraries and I had particular
worries about loan items not being returned - not out of badness or
carelessness on the regugees' paret but simply as an inescapable
consequence of the unsettled lives many lead.  These worries have proved
completely unfounded and a more concerned, less delinquent group of users
would be hard to imagine.  They have made  a certain amount of extra work
for the reading room staff, but on the other hand we have had the
compensation of a group of users happy as hell just to be in our library
and pleased (and in one or two cases amazed) by what is on offer.

Tony McSean
BMA Librarian



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