The Medical Field: Why student doctors are getting out on farms

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Food Programme first met Iain Broadley and Ally Jaffee in 2017, when they were studying medicine in Bristol.

The pair saw a disconnect between the rise of diet-related diseases, and the training they received around nutrition - with some students getting as little as eight hours of compulsory nutrition education during their entire time at medical school. So Ally and Iain founded Nutritank, an organisation championing better nutritional education for healthcare professionals, which earned them the Pat Llewellyn New Talent trophy at the 2019 BBC Food and Farming Awards.

Today Nutritank's active in more than 20 medical school societies across the UK, and has been part of a working group charged with finalising a new nutritional curriculum for medical schools, due out this autumn.

Now, they're piloting a scheme taking student and junior doctors out on farm visits - in a bid to better educate future healthcare professionals about food production and nutrition, so that they in turn can better advise their patients.

So could it work? Sheila joins them on a farm visit to the Great Tew Estate in Oxfordshire, to find out.

She also speaks to Kate Henderson from the estate's farm team, Liz Lake and Caroline Drummond from Linking Environment and Farming, and Dr Glenys Jones: a registered public health nutritionist and deputy chief executive of the Association for Nutrition.

Presented by Sheila Dillon; produced in Bristol by Lucy Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
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0:44.6	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:49.7	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.
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0:55.7	So we've got loads of different aspects to this farm yard.
1:02.1	The grey grain, we can see the big seed drill that's just
1:05.6	finished drilling all the seed this spring. We rent out the grassland for sheep and cattle
1:10.1	to graze. We've got the big office behind us. I'm Kate Henderson and I am part of the
1:15.4	farm team on the Great Two Estate in Oxfordshire. This is a first for us. Today we've
1:20.3	got some medical students coming from Nutri Tank.
1:23.6	It's a student-led organisation and they are promoting the need for nutritional education
1:28.7	within the medical curriculum.
1:30.4	And in fact, if you've been listening to the food program for the past four years you've heard quite a lot about Nutri Tank because these two students who founded it really have stirred things up in the medical training business.
	...

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