Julio Frenk, alumni fellow (1982-84) and President of the University of Miami, co-authored an article in The Lancet that assessed changes to the education of health professionals and how the COVID-19 pandemic altered the education process.
Article summary: The education of health professionals substantially changed before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2010 Lancet Commission examined the 100-year history of health-professional education, beginning with the 1910 Flexner report. Since the publication of the Lancet Commission, several transformative developments have happened, including in competency-based education, interprofessional education, and the large-scale application of information technology to education. Although the COVID-19 pandemic did not initiate these developments, it increased their implementation, and they are likely to have a long-term effect on health-professional education. They converge with other societal changes, such as globalisation of health care and increasing concerns of health disparities across the world, that were exacerbated by the pandemic. In this Health Policy, we list institutional and instructional reforms to assess what has happened to health-professional education since the publication of the Lancet Commission and how the COVID-19 pandemic altered the education process. Read the full Lancet article.
Citation: Frenk, Julio, Lincoln C. Chen, Latha Chandran, Elizabeth O. H. Groff, Roderick King, Afaf Meleis, and Harvey V. Fineberg. “Challenges and Opportunities for Educating Health Professionals After the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The Lancet 400, no. 10362 (October 29, 2022): 1539-56. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02092-X.