{"id":641093,"date":"2026-10-09T10:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/641093\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T10:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:16:09","slug":"medical-school-welcomes-its-first-students-to-hertfordshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/641093\/","title":{"rendered":"Medical school welcomes its first students to Hertfordshire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first medical school in a county has welcomed its inaugural students undertaking a five-year bachelor degree. <\/p>\n

The University of Hertfordshire, external<\/a>‘s medical school, in Hatfield, said it aimed to recruit up to 70 international students a year. <\/p>\n

Students from the university’s first intake have travelled from countries including Australia, Canada, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n

One of them, Vanessa Milne, 56, who is from New Zealand, said: “It’s taken a lot of courage to come here but the staff have been amazing and have made me feel welcome.”<\/p>\n

The school opened a year earlier than expected<\/a> in response to a wider need for doctors in the region.<\/p>\n

Prof Zoe Aslanpour, the head of medicine at the university, said: “For every 1,000 people in the East of England we’ve got 2.5 doctors, whereas in England it’s about 3.2 – so we’re short of 4,500 doctors.”<\/p>\n

Milne said she has been trying to get into medical school for 20 years after a career in pain medicine, rehabilitation and anaesthetics.<\/p>\n

She said: “My end goal is fluid for now and I’m going to carry on and see where that leads me but ultimately I’m interested in public health and pandemic response.<\/p>\n

“It’s a cohort which is predominantly international which speaks to me and brings a lot of different perspectives from all over the world.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first medical school in a county has welcomed its inaugural students undertaking a five-year bachelor degree. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-641093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}