[Medical education: why and how to innovate it]

This paper presents an analysis of some innovative educational perspectives regarding the figure of the physician, on the basis of the awareness that the cultural formation of the medical class represents a major strategy in achieving a high quality medical standard and an effective evidence-based health care. Quality education, both during the graduate curriculum and in the post-graduate phase (today including Decision Making, Knowledge Management, Health Economics, General Practice Medicine, Evidence Based Medicine and Evidence Based History of Medicine, as in the Florence Medical School), is essential for the training of updated health professionals, as well as being geared to life-long learning. The classical medical education paradigm involved knowing, knowing how to do and knowing how to be; today this model should be enriched by other key competences for practicing medicine, among them knowing how to make other people do things and knowing how to continue with self-education. With specific reference to making others carry out tasks, the current need for team work renders it necessary for physicians to reconstruct their competences continuously in the light of the essential integration with the competence of non-medical colleagues with whom they work in an inter-disciplinary pattern. With regard to knowing how to continue with self-education, this is possibly the most relevant current and future challenge, not only for health systems but also for physicians.