By Andrew Young
Auckland Medical School is to start nursing and pharmacy degrees next year, posing a threat to other similar courses.
The school says the new courses are part of its plans to train many medical disciplines on one site, leading to better future teamwork among professionals.
But other institutions are watching
the move cautiously as tertiary institutions compete fiercely for student numbers in the face of strained budgets.
The incoming dean of Otago University's pharmacy school, Professor Ian Tucker, said it was hard to see how Auckland could establish a quality programme given the university's dire financial situation.
"Perhaps it is thought [by Auckland] that running a pharmacy programme would be a lucrative enterprise and a way of trading out of debt."
It would be a great shame to split Government funding for pharmacy study, he said.
For its new nursing courses, Auckland Medical School has hired two senior staff, Margaret Horsburgh and Judy Kilpatrick, from the neighbouring Auckland Institute of Technology.
Associate Professor Horsburgh said the new nursing degree, with an honours option, had extensive clinical training, which was an edge over other courses having smaller, fragmented chunks.
Training nurses alongside budding doctors and pharmacists was also vital for future health care, she said. The school will from this July also offer post-graduate nursing study.
The AIT dean of health studies, Professor Max Abbott, said health circles felt there were already too many schools of nursing. Fifteen institutes offered nursing degrees.
While he did not expect the new course to harshly affect AIT, he said it could affect other courses which did not carry the same high reputation.
The Unitech head of nursing, Heather Moore, said she was concerned that medical school nurses would feel superior to polytechnic-trained staff.
Both new courses are before the Ministries of Health and Education for approval.
Each plans to take 50 students next year, with the intention of eventually doubling that number.
Auckland's chair of the pharmacy establishment board, Professor Murray Mitchell, said there was a pharmacist shortage and a North Island course was logical.
Auckland also offered many more pharmacies for work experience than Dunedin.
