Going beyond the curriculum to promote medical education and practice in Saudi Arabia

The foundation of health starts as early as undergraduate medical education. Medical education in the Kingdom has always been successful in promoting the medical profession and population health. The current issue in the Kingdom is quality assurance in all organizations including the health field. Thus emerges the value of evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of the current system in meeting health needs and expectations. The aim of this paper was to analyze the current situation in order to design a frame for the direction of promotion of medical education and practice that best meets health needs and expectations. In fact, medical practice is a multidisciplinary process that is showing continuously changing theories. It has a broad scope of serving the whole community and improving the quality of life of all population categories. The huge quantity of information, needed to be retained by medical professionals, necessitates the move away from traditional methods of education to more practical and comprehensive programs of study. Most of the recent reform in medical education, in the Kingdom, has focused on curriculum and disregarded the education process. The requisite for the education process is a complete model of community-based health care, education and research. This study proposes a design aiming to enhance medical education and promote the medical profession, through developing the quality of medical professionals, that will foster growth of their activity and productivity, moving them into the community where clinical practice and experience are more relevant to the true health situation.