Educating a New Generation of Doctors to Improve the Health of Populations in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Sandeep Kishore
Medical education in developing world needs to change
Press release from PLoS Medicine
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/plos-mei101211.php
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."
- Low- and middle-income countries need more doctors, but not simply more of the same.
- Insufficient collaboration between the health and education sectors creates a crippling mismatch between professional education and the realities of health service delivery.
- A transformative scale-up of medical education is needed to increase the capacity of health systems to respond to population needs.
- Transformative scale-up will require inter-sectoral engagement to determine how students are recruited, educated, and deployed and will assign greater value to the impact on population health outcomes among the criteria for measuring excellence.
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Best wishes,
Karolina Maciag
MD/PhD Candidate, Harvard Medical School/MIT-HST
Hacohen Lab, Broad Insitute
Member of UAEM International Coordinating Committee and Harvard and MIT Chapters
Co-coordinator, International Outreach
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Sandeep P. Kishore, Ph.D.
Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School