Ann Westmore: I believe that undergraduate teaching became a particular focus under you, Peter.

Peter Phelan: I was fortunate initially to have Max [Robinson], but he decided to retire about four years after I took over. Max and I had initiated some fairly major curriculum changes when I took over. We progressively reduced the number of formal teaching sessions, increased bedside teaching, gave students more time to pursue independent research. I thought it was important that the Stevenson Professor had a high profile in the learning activities and we generally got the best reports of any of the teaching programs in the clinical years. So the students saw it as a very effective group.

Ann Westmore: So was this more of an apprenticeship model?

Peter Phelan: Yes we sought to teach better, and we tried to reduce the size of teaching groups in the ward, it had been six or seven, and we tried to break that down. And we were also fortunate in being able to recruit people from outside. Arthur [Clark], once he retired from Monash, kindly agreed to come back and teach. We started to rotate students to country hospitals, in effect we had a rural clinical school before they became popular. And we had many overseas elective students.

Ann Westmore: So were you able to show that this was a better model?

Peter Phelan: We certainly managed to attract an outstanding group of people into paediatric training over those years.

Susan Sawyer: But Peter, I have heard that one of the reasons for that was your personal involvement with students. And someone told me a few years ago that before each student rotation, you already knew which were the outstanding students by name and photograph, and would be approaching each of them very early on in their rotation at the Children's Hospital and formed a personal relationship with people which I’m sure would have been a very powerful way of attracting a very high calibre of future paediatricians.

Peter Phelan: I did. Absolutely. I make no bones about it.

Kester Brown: I'd like to make a comment about the student teaching. I’m not sure if it was during your time or before when anaesthetics got a session.

Peter Phelan: I think that was before my time.

Kester Brown: I think that was a very important step because there was no exposure [of medical students] to anaesthesia in our Hospital, yet we had a Department full of outstanding people. So we arranged a situation where we had one hour for a lecture, and we tended to talk about the basic science applied to what we were doing. The students were allocated each specifically for a session and they had one-to-one teaching in that time. And a lot of those students found that very useful.

Another thing we got involved with, through the University Standing Committee on Anaesthetics, was the third year extension course that used to go for six weeks on a Wednesday afternoon. We ran a course on basic science applied to paediatric anaesthesia because I had always felt that in the traditional medical school set-up you learnt your basic science and nobody told you how to apply it to what you were going to do. And then you went along to the clinical side and you'd forgotten the basic science. We managed to combine those.

And there were a few very informative reports written at the end by the students. One fellow wrote to us afterwards, and thanked us for running this course because before that he had been so disenchanted with his pre-clinical course, not knowing where it was leading him, and he was thinking of quitting. Now having had basic science explained in clinical terms, he could see where he was, and was all fired up to carry on. I think the new curriculum is hopefully addressing that because it's absolutely key. I’ve felt it for years, that it is one of the defects of medical education. And I was very appreciative of the Department letting us have the medical students for that period.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine