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Health Professions Educators Confront a New Era

This historic Congress of Health Professions Educators was designed to advance a new vision for health professions education for the future. For the first time ever, faculty and administrators from across the spectrum of university-based health professions schools gathered to consider critical new directions for the educational and professional environments, including the current trends toward multidisciplinary education, professional practice reforms, institutional reorganization, community-based training, and primary care.

The Congress showed that health professions educators do indeed recognize the need not only for greater collaboration but also for ongoing communication among professions. We hope to facilitate this process by convening a second congress in 1994 and by exploring the potential for state or regional congresses that could be focused on more detailed study of interdisciplinary education, curriculum development, and models for training. The Congress highlighted how significant and necessary the educational perspective is to both state and national policymaking while at the same time reflecting the resolve of health professions educators to participate in designing and enacting solutions to our health care problems.

These proceedings present a broad overview of the barriers and opportunities for innovation and change. In Part I, we set the stage with a look at current and future health care environments, academic leadership for the 1990s, and the evolutionary roles of universities in society. Finally, health professions education is addressed in the context of the education, research, and service mission of the academic health center—the institutions with major responsibilities for educating the nation's health care workforce. In the papers in Part II, educators from the various health professions present their perspectives, particularly on primary care issues. Finally, representatives from the federal executive and legislative branches and health policy experts further analyze the political scene in Part III.

Copyright © 1993 by the Association of Academic Health Centers.  Available here with permission.