Questioning the Premedical Paradigm: Enhancing Diversity in the Medical Profession a Century After the Flexner Report - Couverture rigide

Barr, Donald A.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0801894166 ISBN 13 : 9780801894169

Editeur : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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 ofHealth; 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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0801894166
• ISBN 13: 9780801894169
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 240
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible