So a dyslexic medical student is to launch a legal claim against the General Medical Council to try and get the GMC to stop using multiple choice tests. The 21-year old student, Naomi Gadian claims that the test is discriminatory and inappriopriate as it is unlikely she would be presented with four options when making a diagnosis or selecting a therapy in a real job situation. The student has good A-levels so obviously hasn't been held back so far in her medical education by her dyslexia.
This issue worries me. Maybe I'm making too light of a serious issue but isn't it the case that medical terminology is particularly hard to spell and being good at recognising one condition or treatment from another is a required skill for the job?
Conceptually the whole idea of 'disability' as covered by the Disability Discrimination Act is problemmatic as far as I'm concerned. The law should be there to protect people from discrimination which is not relevant to the job or profession. Therefore, discrimination on the grounds of ability that is relevant to the job is surely reasonable? For some professions, dyslexia is going to make someone less able to do the job than another person without the 'disability'. It doesn't seem unreasonable in medicine to require students to be able to distinguish between technical terms reasonably quickly and accurately. But this is an issue where feelings tend to run high so I expect others may disagree.