Triple Qualification
Successful candidates could register with the General Medical Council (GMC) and practise medicine in the United Kingdom.
[8] The Queen Margaret College Medical School for Women merged with the University of Glasgow in 1892.
[7][12] Candidates for the TQ were first required to pass a preliminary entrance examination or show evidence of an approved university degree.
[2] From 1968 international graduates from approved medical schools could be admitted directly to the final examination.
[14] Candidates who successfully completed the course and passed the examinations could place the post-nominals LRCPE, LRCSE & LRCPSG after their names and could apply for provisional registration with the GMC.
[2] Many of the candidates came from countries of the former British Empire, many came from Europe and others from Russia, China, Japan, South America and the United States.
[17] In the latter years of the 19th century, this included women whose entry to British university medical schools began in 1892.
[17] Some of these Jewish refugees who qualified with the TQ went on to academic careers in the UK, like Hans Kosterlitz, who fled from Berlin to Aberdeen where he worked with J J R MacLeod, who had, jointly with Frederick Banting, won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin.
Kosterlitz qualified with the Triple Qualification in 1938, and eventually became Professor of Pharmacology at Aberdeen University in 1968.
[19] He went on to discover endorphins[20] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society who awarded him their prestigious gold medal.
[2] Throughout its lifetime, controversy was never far away from the TQ, the conjoint examination and the LMSSA (Licence in Medicine and Surgery of the Society of Apothecaries).
In 1870, Edinburgh University told Parliament that it had a ‘fully equipped medical school which was operating to higher standards than any of the other award bodies’.
[2] From 1979 the GMC required prospective international candidates for the TQ to sit and pass the PLAB examination.
[14] Freedom of movement of workers within the European Union from 1973 began the process of EU qualified medical practitioners practising in the UK without any examination.
