Reevaluation of Medical Education

Abstract

More than half of graduating seniors rate their curricula inadequate in health promotion and disease prevention (HPDP) topics, and available data suggest that current medical school curricula turn students away from career choices that foster prevention. Data are needed to show that prevention education works to encourage students to pursue HPDP in practice and thus support greater emphasis on prevention in medical school curricula. This article presents a model that relates health promotion and disease prevention education to desired characteristics of medical school graduates including knowledge and sense of ability in HPDP, specialty preference, and residency choice, while accounting for other factors that influence those characteristics. The model willfacilitate evaluation ofprograms by using NBME, AAMC, and other standardized datasets and may be used to find exemplary programs from among experimental efforts in U.S. medical schools and to evaluate their replication.