[FUTURE CHALLENGES OF MEDICAL EDUCATION]

Medical education faces three challenges: those related to admission policies to medical schools (can "non-academic" qualifications such as compassion and social orientation be identified?), the clinical learning environment (is "bedside" teaching the optimal way to impart clinical skills?) and the duration of medical training (can it be shortened?). I believe that over the next decades, the assessment of "non-academic" qualifications in screening medical school candidates will be the subject of critical review, and may even be canceled; the limitations of the hospital learning environment will lead to the transfer of clinical training to community clinics; and that an effort will be made to reduce the duration of medical training by splitting the curriculum into distinct career tracks, such as primary medicine, biomedical research and diagnosis by ancillary testing, secondary and tertiary clinical medicine, and epidemiology and public health.