Undergraduate Medical Education

The decade of the 1980s was a time of reappraisal for medical education. A number of significant reports, including "Future Directions for Medical Education" from the American Medical Association and "Physicians for the Twenty-First Century" (the GPEP Report) from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) called for changes in the structure and process of medical education. These reports grew out of the desire to ensure that medical school graduates be able to fit into the changing health care provision system and to meet the health care needs of the future. It is perhaps too early to assess the effect such calls for reform have had on the medical school curriculum and on the graduate. Curriculum changes, such as an increase in small-group, student-centered instructional formats, have been adopted by many schools. Whether the educational product of the medical school, that is, the medical school graduate, is different as a