Medical Education - What are you doing?
October 27th, 2008 by Candice Chen (email author)In the past I’ve written about what government and the presidential candidates are doing in terms of developing a health care workforce to meet the needs of the nation. This week the Macy Foundation convened a working group to look at medical education’s role in this critical health care issue during this period of medical school expansion. Participants included medical school deans and leaders from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine and the Association of Academic Health Centers.
I sat in on this meeting as an observer and I was reassured to know that medical education leadership is taking on this issue seriously, recognizing the opportunity to shape America’s future physician workforce. I was also impressed at the level of consensus on the responsibility of medical education to produce not only quality physicians, but physicians that meet the social mission of medical education - that is the production of a diverse workforce equitably distributed both geographically and across medical specialties.
The working group’s recommendations included:
- Re-evaluating increasingly arcane admission policies in order to align those policies with factors that truly correlate with the desired characteristics of future physicians (another issue recently discussed on the MEFS blog).
- Evaluating the full effect of student debt on medical education’s mission and working to substantially reduce debt as a barrier to the mission.
- Promoting educational innovations such as moving away from traditional 2+2 year models, increasing longitudinal clinical training, evaluating new sites for clinical education, and promoting inter-professional team models.
- Calling on foundations and government to support innovation and the social mission both at the education level and at the national workforce level, specifically calling on the federal government to expand the Title VII and the National Health Service Corps and to develop a national institute for health workforce research and policy.