Faculty development, teacher training and teacher accreditation in medical education: twenty years from now

To address the issue of faculty development in the year 2020, an attempt is made to predict the structure of the future medical school and the profile of a future medical teacher. By projecting from the technological, sociological and structural processes that affect medical education, it can be envisaged that there will be several types of medical teachers, namely specialists, who will be resource people for the students, evaluators of student performance, and a minority of 'process teachers'. The role of the process teachers will be to tutor, facilitate learning, coach and guide the students in the only domain which cannot be self-learned by technological devices, namely: moral issues, interpersonal communication and crisis management. Each type of teacher requires a different training programme. All programmes, however, should be comprehensive, longitudinal or multiphasic, and lead the faculty member from orientation in both the institution and the educational field to a leadership position by successive approximations. It is further expected that societal demands will impose teacher accreditation and, perhaps, licensing. This, however, will remain in the medical profession's hands, and may bring about a resolution of the 'role-profession conflict', and a more favourable self-perception of faculty members as teachers. Finally, an optimistic conclusion is drawn for the future of medical education.