Questioning the Premedical Paradigm

Enhancing Diversity in the Medical Profession a Century After the Flexner Report
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8018-9416-9
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

This book raises fundamental questions about the propriety of continuing to use a premedical curriculum developed more than a century ago to select students for training as future physicians for the twenty-first century. In it, Dr. Donald A. Barr examines the historical origins, evolution, and current state of premedical education in the United States.

One hundred years ago, Abraham Flexner's report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada helped establish the modern paradigm of premedical and medical education. Barr’s research finds the system of premedical education that evolved to be a poor predictor of subsequent clinical competency and professional excellence, while simultaneously discouraging many students from underrepresented minority groups or economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing a career as a physician. Analyzing more than fifty years of research, Barr shows that many of the best prospects are not being admitted to medical schools, with long-term adverse consequences for the U.S. medical profession.

The root of the problem, Barr argues, is the premedical curriculum—which overemphasizes biology, chemistry, and physics by teaching them as separate, discrete subjects. In proposing a fundamental restructuring of premedical education, Barr makes the case for parallel tracks of undergraduate science education: one that would largely retain the current system; and a second that would integrate the life sciences in a problem-based, collaborative learning pedagogy. Barr argues that the new, integrated curriculum will encourage greater educational and social diversity among premedical candidates without weakening the quality of the education. He includes an evaluative research framework to judge the outcome of such a restructured system.

This historical and cultural analysis of premedical education in the United States is the crucial first step in questioning the appropriateness of continuing a hundred-year-old, empirically dubious pedagogical model for the twenty-first century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barr, Donald A

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Pädagogik Schulen, Schulleitung Universitäten, Hochschulen
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Introduction
1. Who Drops Out of Premed, and Why?
2. The Historical Origins of Premedical Education in the United States, 1873– 1905
3. A National Standard for Premedical Education
4. Premedical Education and the Prediction of Professional Performance
5. Noncognitive Factors That Predict Professional Performance
6. Efforts to Increase the Diversity of the Medical Profession
7. Nontraditional Programs of Medical Education and Their Success in Training Qualified Physicians
8. Reassessing the Premedical Paradigm
9. Another Way to Structure Premedical Education
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Barr, Donald A
Donald A. Barr, MD, PhD, is professor emeritus at Stanford University in the Department of Pediatrics. He is the author of Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Social Determinants of Health; Introduction to Biosocial Medicine: The Social, Psychological, and Biological Determinants of Human Behavior and Well-Being; and Crossing the American Health Care Chasm: Finding the Path to Bipartisan Collaboration in National Health Care Policy.

Donald A. Barr, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor at Stanford University in the Departments of Pediatrics and Sociology. He is the author of Introduction to U.S. Health Policy, second edition, and Health Disparities in the United States, both also published by Johns Hopkins.