An overview of medical education in Neurology in Colombia

Abstract

Medical education has been largely influenced by the Flexner reform of 1910, which revolutionized medical pedagogy in the 20th century. In 2010, a new analysis of the state of medical and graduate education, also sponsored by the Carnegie Institute, was presented and identified a number of areas for improvement. These include excessive length and rigidity of programs, emphasis on memorization, lack of integration between formal knowledge and experiential learning, clinical teaching by residents and supervised by physicians who have less time to teach, inadequate patient care, and hospitals without an educational mission. In the search for medical innovation, this analysis suggests possible interventions: standardizing and individualizing the learning process; promoting various ways of integrating the teaching of basic knowledge and clinical practice; incorporating habits of research and continuous improvement, prioritizing the progressive development of physicians' professional identity.

Since the World Summit on Medical Education in Edinburgh in 1993, the importance of the link between medical education and health systems has been raised; the balance between the training of health professionals and the needs of the community; the rational training of specialists in accordance with the needs of the population; the improvement of the communication skills of the medical community, understanding that their education should be based on the populations to which it is directed, including the epidemiological context of the patient and his or her community. New currents also raise the importance of humanization in health and professionalism within the pillars of medical education.