Medical education in developing world needs to change

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Francesca Celletti from the WHO, Geneva, Switzerland and colleagues argue that a transformation in the scale-up of medical education in low- and middle-income countries is needed. Such a transformative approach would require inter-sectoral engagement to determine how students are recruited, educated, and deployed and would assign greater value to the impact on population health outcomes as one of the criteria used for measuring excellence in educational initiatives.

The authors say: "strategies to improve retention and increase student numbers are unlikely to suffice without efforts to also address the fundamental shortcomings in current approaches to medical education…Only via a more symbiotic relationship between medical education and population health will educational reform have the potential to deliver real improvements in health outcomes in the poorest regions of the globe."

More information:
Celletti F, Reynolds TA, Wright A, Stoertz A, Dayrit M (2011) Educating a New Generation of Doctors to Improve the Health of Populations in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. PLoS Med 8(10): e1001108. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001108

Provided by Public Library of Science