Just like those in government, those in medical education also love the concept of change for change’s sake. I’ve been on lots of teaching courses where all people do is sit around and play with their haemorrhoids and debate how they can make teaching even more abstract. These factors, plus the free biscuits, day off patients and the Blue Peter badge equivalent of a certificate of attendance are exactly why I attend these courses. But I’m going to stop, because they’re beginning to make me feel old.

There’s no way to feel closer to your own mortality than to work in ‘innovation’ at the level of policy making.

Take problem based learning, which some med schools have introduced, thinking it’s revolutionary. When I was teaching, sorry, facilitating, problem based learning, I was specifically forbidden from imparting knowledge. We covered the most abstract of subjects to hammer home the point that it is not facts that we wish the students to learn, but an approach to a subject.

It was perfectly acceptable to answer every students’ question with another in order to make them discover the answer for themselves. (This confused some of the more old-skool teachers who, instead of asking probing questions simply repeated ‘What would you do if you were in Outer Mongolia with no-one around to help?’)

Well that’s fine in theory. I agree it’s more important to be thinking about the right questions than the right answers. But the people innovating the curriculums have missed the point. They grew up in the TV generation and think everyone needs to be taught to sit forward and take part.

But they’ve forgotten that the students are from the internet and iPhone generation – they’re already on the edge of the sofa hunched over their pads and phones. So asking them to spend three hours, void of technology, philosophising over what might be appropriate things to research to answer a clinical problem, is mind-bogglingly weird for them. My job title as ‘facilitator’ translated as ‘muppet’ to the UK students, and ‘fraudster’ to the international ones, who were already skyping their parents asking for transfers back home.

Medical school curriculums need to follow the club scene and go all vintage. Big anatomy textbooks, ritual humiliation by bowtie wearing consultants and eponymous syndromes are back in fashion. And who can blame the students for wanting gloopy-eyed sentimentality when everything else in medicine is changing so fast it’s like a scene from Apocalypse Now?