| Summary: | Medical education in the twenty first century is a complex undertaking and is
occurring in a setting of rapidly increasing change. Training students and residents to the
point of clinical proficiency requires educational skills and knowledge that are rarely
taught to most physicians. Academic health centers are increasingly part of a 'healthindustrial
complex' which often places their educational missions in conflict with the
revenue-generating requirements of patient care and research. The increasing role of
commercial forces in medicine poses threats to the societal obligations of physicians such
as patient and healthcare advocacy. Neither has medical education escaped the forces of
globalization that have radically transformed much of the planet.
Medical educational leaders are therefore going to require skills and knowledge to
respond to these challenges. These are capacities that go beyond the scope of most
faculty development programs, which usually provide minimal instruction in educational
theory and research. Graduate programs in medical education can however satisfy many
of these leaders' educational needs.
The capacities that these programs will require to address these needs were
conceptualized in a framework having outcomes at four levels: 1) individual
2) institutional 3) societal and 4) global. Three focus groups of North American medical
educators were asked to discuss these capacities in the context of this framework. Data
were also obtained from the mission statements of 21 English-language masters programs
in medical education.
The focus groups confirmed the importance of graduate educational training for
physician-educators, emphasizing topics with individual and institutional implications
such as curriculum planning, student assessment, program evaluation and educational
research. There was minimal discussion about the societal and global ramifications of
medical education. The only significant references to these notions emanated from the mission statements of the minority of medical educational programs located in faculties
of education.
When characterizing what capacities were important for graduate programs in
medical education to develop, medical educators adopted an approach best understood
via a framework derived from the adult educational program planning literature. They
were reluctant to embrace the broader societal and global notions that have informed
adult education over the past few decades. === Education, Faculty of === Educational Studies (EDST), Department of === Graduate
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