PHM-Exch> Medical education for the 21st century - Health professionals for a new century

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC) <ruglucia at paho.org>

 *Health professionals for a new century:
transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent
world

*

Prof Julio Frenk a, Dr Lincoln Chen b ‡  , Prof Zulfiqar A Bhutta c, Prof
Jordan Cohen d, Nigel Crisp e, Prof Timothy Evans f, Harvey Fineberg g, Prof
Patricia Garcia h, Prof Yang Ke i, Patrick Kelley g, Barry Kistnasamy j,
Prof Afaf Meleis k, Prof David Naylor l, Ariel Pablos-Mendez m, Prof Srinath
Reddy n, Susan Scrimshaw o, Jaime Sepulveda p, Prof David Serwadda q, Prof
Huda Zurayk r

 Available online at: http://bit.ly/edUAoJ

 “…..A Lancet Commission highlights a call from 20 professional and academic
leaders for major reform in the training of doctors and other healthcare
professionals for the 21st century. Changes are needed because of
fragmented, outdated, and static curricula that produce ill-equipped
graduates. The Commission argues for major reform across the entire medical
education system, in order to produce competency-led curricula for the
future…”



“…..100 years ago, a series of studies about the education of health
professionals, led by the 1910 Flexner report, sparked groundbreaking
reforms. Through integration of modern science into the curricula at
university-based schools, the reforms equipped health professionals with the
knowledge that contributed to the doubling of life span during the 20th
century.

 By the beginning of the 21st century, however, all is not well. Glaring
gaps and inequities in health persist both within and between countries,
underscoring our collective failure to share the dramatic health advances
equitably. At the same time, fresh health challenges loom. New infectious,
environmental, and behavioural risks, at a time of rapid demographic and
epidemiological transitions, threaten health security of all. Health systems
worldwide are struggling to keep up, as they become more complex and costly,
placing additional demands on health workers.

 Professional education has not kept pace with these challenges, largely
because of fragmented, outdated, and static curricula that produce
ill-equipped graduates. The problems are systemic: mismatch of competencies
to patient and population needs; poor teamwork; persistent gender
stratification of professional status; narrow technical focus without
broader contextual understanding; episodic encounters rather than continuous
care; predominant hospital orientation at the expense of primary care;
quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the professional labour market;
and weak leadership to improve health-system performance. Laudable efforts
to address these deficiencies have mostly floundered, partly because of the
so-called tribalism of the professions—ie, the tendency of the various
professions to act in isolation from or even in competition with each other.

 Redesign of professional health education is necessary and timely, in view
of the opportunities for mutual learning and joint solutions offered by
global interdependence due to acceleration of flows of knowledge,
technologies, and financing across borders, and the migration of both
professionals and patients. What is clearly needed is a thorough and
authoritative re-examination of health professional education, matching the
ambitious work of a century ago.

 That is why this Commission, consisting of 20 professional and academic
leaders from diverse countries, came together to develop a shared vision and
a common strategy for postsecondary education in medicine, nursing, and
public health that reaches beyond the confines of national borders and the
silos of individual professions.



The Commission adopted a global outlook, a multiprofessional perspective,
and a systems approach. This comprehensive framework considers the
connections between education and health systems. It is centred on people as
co-producers and as drivers of needs and demands in both systems. By
interaction through the labour market, the provision of educational services
generates the supply of an educated workforce to meet the demand for
professionals to work in the health system. To have a positive effect on
health outcomes, the professional education subsystem must design new
instructional and institutional strategies…..”





a Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

b China Medical Board, Cambridge, MA, USA

c Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan

d George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA

e Independent member of House of Lords, London, UK

f James P Grant School of Public Health, Dhaka, Bangladesh

g US Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA

h School of Public Health Universidad Peruana Cayetano, Heredia, Lima, Peru

i Peking University Health Science Centre, Beijing, China

j National Health Laboratory Service, Johannesburg, South Africa

k School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

l University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

m The Rockefeller Foundation, New York, NY, USA

n Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India

o The Sage Colleges, Troy, MI, USA

p Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA

q Makarere University School of Public Health, Kampala, Uganda

r Centre for Research on Population and Health, Faculty of Health Sciences,
American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20101130/26f759dd/attachment.html>