Health professional education—current status and future perspectives

Abstract

Although principle of health professional education—thinking necessity and demands to extract educational needs, set the goals out of variety of needs, construct effective and efficient learning strategies and structure the evaluation methods—has not much changed, environments surrounding medical education have changed a great deal. The medical professionals have to keep learning from the first day of professional school to the last day of practice. During this lifelong commitment, we have been obliged to focus on social sciences, medical humanities and social accountabilities facing aging population and advanced technologies and cutting-edge medical knowledge. Global trend of medical education is ‘transprofessional medical education.’ This concept is beyond the interprofessional education, which is becoming common globally, involving health and social care professional students and practitioners from variety of heath care professionals. Currently curriculum of Japanese medical schools consists of core-curriculum which all the medical schools have to follow—two thirds of the total hours—and selective curriculum about which each medical schools can design originally. One size does not fit all. I wish variety of school of pharmacy designing variety of innovative curriculum learning from the strengths and weaknesses medical schools have experienced.