Specialties and the specialty boards

As specialism has developed in the United States, multiple specialty societies and specialty boards have been created. Although they, in a very realistic fashion, have established the general standards for the delivery of specialty care and for graduate medical education, they, with other national medical organizations such as the American Medical Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the American Hospital Association, function with a considerable degree of independence. There is lacking a cohesive and integrated effort to develop unified attitudes, postures, and policies that represent the medical profession and the health care industry in general. Recently the Coordinating Council on Medical Education and the Liaison Committee on Graduate Medical Education have been established. These two agencies represent a significant attempt to integrate policies for medical education and to identify a single accrediting agency that will apply uniform standards to the process of accrediting programs of graduate medical education. The federal government for the past several years has had an increasing interest in the health care industry and medical education. Many legislative bills have been passed which have imposed more and more regulations on medicine and have established more bureaucratic control over the professional activities of physicians. Insidiously the medical profession is being socialized. If accountability for the public welfare cannot be exercised by medicine, at least in the perspective of the federal government, more and more legislation and regulation are inevitable. The pluralistic structure of organized medicine will ultimately be self defeating. Cohesive policies on behalf of the medical profession must be developed if leadership in medicine is to remain in the private sector. The Coordinating Council on Medical Education is unquestionably a significant attempt to demonstrate public accountability. It is, however, only the first step in the long and difficult process of developing cohesive national policies on behalf of organized medicine.