Health professional education: perpetuating obsolescence?

Abstract

THE CURRENT SUITE of health professions was established to respond to health care needs of the distant past. Organisation of health professional skills that is based on health care practices of previous centuries is unlikely to serve the public health care system in the future. Judging by the number of papers on health professional education we received, it appears that health care practitioners, policy makers and educators may be slowly realising that, just like many of the health care technologies of the 18th century, the organisation of our health professional workforce has become obsolete. But, as identified in a survey of Australian health workforce policy experts, there is a fundamental lack of coordination between the national and state levels of government and insufficient long-range planning to effectively address health professional workforce issues (see page 385).