Medical education in the United States and Canada, 2010

The authors present an overview of the educational programs, infrastructure to support them, and the assessment strategies of 128 medical schools in the United States and Canada, based on reports submitted by those schools and published in this supplement to Academic Medicine. The authors explore many important changes that have occurred since the publication of the Flexner Report in 1910 as well as the progress that is evident since a similar collection of medical school reports was published in September 2000, also as a supplement to Academic Medicine. Drawing on the reports, the authors summarize, among other topics, the advances that have taken place in the support for faculty, the funding of medical student education, changes in pedagogy and assessment, and the expansion of medical education to distributed models and regional campuses.The authors observe that the reports from the 128 schools illustrate that medical student education has undergone and continues to undergo substantive change, has advanced markedly since the reforms stimulated by the Flexner Report, and has continued to evolve during the past decade. The reports illustrate the strength of support for the educational programs, even in a time of financial constraints, and the increasing recognition of the scholarly contributions of faculty through teaching. The authors provide examples of the changes in pedagogy and new topics in the required curriculum in the past decade and describe selected highlights of the 128 educational programs.