[Prospective analysis of medical education]

Measuring the quality of the medical education imparted in a school or faculty requires a conceptual frame of reference that take account of the socioeconomic and political context and the structure and standards of the health services in the country considered. Quality must be judged by the extent to which medical training responds not only to current but also to future needs and expectations. Hence the determination of quality also requires a prospective study. A study is made of the situation in the medical schools of Latin America with a view to establishing how medical education was and is in the Region and those characteristics are taken as a yardstick for a school that can meet the demands of the future, preferably toward the year 2000, the horizon year for the world health goals. The author builds a detailed "objective-image" model of medical education in the year 2000, from which he derives four attributes or indicators that can be used to evaluate the education process in any institution. These indicators relate to four salient aspects of medical education: context, structure, function and integration.