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Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency
EDUCATING PHYSICIANS The current blueprint for medical education in North America was drawn up in 1910 by Abraham Flexner in his report Medical Education in the United States and Canada . The basic features outlined by Flexner remain in place today. Yet with the past century's enormous societal changes, the practice of medicine and its scientific, pharmacological, and technological foundations have been transformed. Now medical education in the United States is at a crossroads: those who teach medical students and residents must choose whether to continue in the direction established over a hundred years ago or to take a fundamentally different course, guided by contemporary innovation and new understandings about how people learn. Emerging from an extensive study of physician education by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Educating Physicians calls for a major overhaul of the present approach to preparing doctors for their careers. The text addresses major issues for the future of the field and takes a comprehensive look at the most pressing concerns in physician education today. The key findings of the study recommend four goals for medical education: standardization of learning outcomes and individualization of the learning process; integration of formal knowledge and clinical experience; development of habits of inquiry and innovation; and focus on professional identity formation. Like The Carnegie Foundation's revolutionizing Flexner Report of 1910, Educating Physicians is destined to change the way administrators and faculty in medical schools and programs prepare their physicians for the future.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 29, 2010
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August 23, 2024
8/23/24: I'm starting a more in-depth review of this entire series on my adult learning Substack here. If you really want to geek out about how doctors learn, check it out!
Educating Physicians is an update to the 1910 Flexner report, that ground-breaking assessment that laid out a path to medical school reform and resulted in the current physician learning model most people are familiar with today (two years of classroom study, followed by two years of clinical rotations). That model succeeded for decades, but it is no longer in lock step with the needs of today’s students, the demands of our current healthcare system, and the changing expectations of society towards its physicians. Educating Physicians makes suggestions for what medical schools should look like in twenty-first century, including moving away from a model where scientific concepts are so segregated from clinical application.
I loved every minute I spent reading Educating Physicians; it filled me with new ideas and research questions and countless pages of my copy are now covered in scrawl where I want to apply concepts to my own (non-medical) work. However, please note it is not for everyone: this is a highly niche topic and if you aren’t in its target audience you are going to get 3 pages into this and fall asleep in boredom and never trust my reviews again. So, reader, know thyself.
That said, there are three appropriate audiences for this book:
• Anyone working IN medicine (particularly medical educators): As mentioned above, this book is about proposed reforms to medical education, so this is pretty self-explanatory. However, considering that much of medical education comes from peer learning, nearly all persons working in medicine are educators and could thus gain from the ideas and suggestions within these pages.
• People interested in pedagogy/educational research/instructional design: I’m a firm believer in improving mastery of your own field by searching for similar concepts in disparate industries. If you’re someone who cares about effective educational methods, this book is an amazing resource for exploring the question of how to better design curriculum, deliver instruction, and assess abstract concepts like professionalism and ethics. Taking someone just out of college who was probably doing keg stands two weeks ago and turning them into a doctor who can perform open heart surgery is no mean feat, and there’s much to be gained from understanding medicine’s pedagogical approach.
• Aspiring Medical Students: If you’re thinking about medical school, this book is worth a skim (not a deep read) to (1) get a sense of what questions you should be asking when researching medical schools, (2) understand the deeper systematic issues facing American medicine, (3) make a plan of how to best approach your own learning over the next 7-10 years. Reading this book will help guide your approach to becoming a lifelong learner, while also assist in selecting schools that are experimenting with innovative ideas to make your path to physician personalized and creative instead of focused on rote memorization.
Anyways, I’m off to read the Carnegie reports on educating engineers, lawyers, PhD students, and the clergy, so more exciting updates to come!!!!!!!!
Educating Physicians is an update to the 1910 Flexner report, that ground-breaking assessment that laid out a path to medical school reform and resulted in the current physician learning model most people are familiar with today (two years of classroom study, followed by two years of clinical rotations). That model succeeded for decades, but it is no longer in lock step with the needs of today’s students, the demands of our current healthcare system, and the changing expectations of society towards its physicians. Educating Physicians makes suggestions for what medical schools should look like in twenty-first century, including moving away from a model where scientific concepts are so segregated from clinical application.
I loved every minute I spent reading Educating Physicians; it filled me with new ideas and research questions and countless pages of my copy are now covered in scrawl where I want to apply concepts to my own (non-medical) work. However, please note it is not for everyone: this is a highly niche topic and if you aren’t in its target audience you are going to get 3 pages into this and fall asleep in boredom and never trust my reviews again. So, reader, know thyself.
That said, there are three appropriate audiences for this book:
• Anyone working IN medicine (particularly medical educators): As mentioned above, this book is about proposed reforms to medical education, so this is pretty self-explanatory. However, considering that much of medical education comes from peer learning, nearly all persons working in medicine are educators and could thus gain from the ideas and suggestions within these pages.
• People interested in pedagogy/educational research/instructional design: I’m a firm believer in improving mastery of your own field by searching for similar concepts in disparate industries. If you’re someone who cares about effective educational methods, this book is an amazing resource for exploring the question of how to better design curriculum, deliver instruction, and assess abstract concepts like professionalism and ethics. Taking someone just out of college who was probably doing keg stands two weeks ago and turning them into a doctor who can perform open heart surgery is no mean feat, and there’s much to be gained from understanding medicine’s pedagogical approach.
• Aspiring Medical Students: If you’re thinking about medical school, this book is worth a skim (not a deep read) to (1) get a sense of what questions you should be asking when researching medical schools, (2) understand the deeper systematic issues facing American medicine, (3) make a plan of how to best approach your own learning over the next 7-10 years. Reading this book will help guide your approach to becoming a lifelong learner, while also assist in selecting schools that are experimenting with innovative ideas to make your path to physician personalized and creative instead of focused on rote memorization.
Anyways, I’m off to read the Carnegie reports on educating engineers, lawyers, PhD students, and the clergy, so more exciting updates to come!!!!!!!!
Displaying 1 of 1 review