Letters: Primary care needs more emphasis in medical education, healthcare

In the recent Q&A with American Medical Association CEO Dr. James Madara, Madara says medical schools and residency programs need to evolve to ensure physicians are more responsive to such things as team care, finances, consumerism and technological innovation.

The AMA’s efforts to change medical education for the 21st century are sorely needed. Physicians can be part of major reform only if they are fully aware of the crisis in our healthcare system. Present care and medical education emphasize specialty practice with too little recognition of the necessity of placing primary-care physicians at the center of longitudinal care for the public.

Primary-care physicians do not receive the professional standing they deserve nor the income that will encourage them, especially with the high cost of medical education.

Some illustrious medical schools have no department of family medicine; all med schools need to re-emphasize primary care.

I look forward to hearing more about the AMA program.

Dr. Robert Scott
Emeritus professor of internal medicine
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine

I appreciated the recent articles on how medical schools are addressing the challenges in physician training. My colleagues and I want to make certain Modern Healthcare readers are aware of another highly innovative and mission-focused medical school—California University of Science and Medicine.

Unlike most medical schools, CUSM can boast that almost all basic science faculty are M.D./Ph.D.s, and we provide lectures online weeks in advance of student need. We were one of the first schools to have flipped classrooms—which use a more collaborative approach to learning—and our students don’t receive one mentor, but two. The curriculum is built on the principle of providing transformative education, and graduates are expected to be leaders, even as our healthcare system evolves. We offer our curriculum 
free of charge to Third World countries, with global and population health built in as an integral part of student studies.

The curriculum is also unusual in its approach to undergraduate physician training by closely integrating two key components: the first brings together a pipeline program for local high schools/colleges and a region-specific student admissions/recruitment strategy that aims to encourage local training and retention of M.D. graduates. The second integrates the learning of basic science with the acquisition of clinical skills from the first day of medical school and aligns clinical skills training with a service learning program so students can make a real contribution to our local communities long before they graduate from medical school.

Dr. Peter Eveland
Interim dean
California University of Science 
and Medicine