Abstract
Medical education has gone through tremendous evolution over the last few centuries. In the pre-Flexner and Osler era, medical education was mainly an apprenticeship-based model. After Flexner’s report in 1910, medical schools were more formalized in the West and became affiliated with universities. They ran four-year undergraduate courses comprising 2 years in preclinical basic science and two years in the clinical phase. Many other countries followed the British model, with five years of undergraduate training and one year of intensive internship training in the hospital. These knowledge-laden, didactic, teacher-centered courses could not produce skilled physicians to meet the challenges and health care needs of the 21st century. That is why innovative teaching methodologies were introduced in medical schools. Problembased learning, team-based learning, flipped classrooms, and integrated curriculum concepts were introduced. In Bangladesh, the medical education also going through a similar transition and heading towards an integrated medical curriculum. Pharmacology being a core preclinical science, is, in fact, at the cusps of clinical education. To produce competent physicians with good prescribing competency, knowledge of drugs is essential. In this perspective, pharmacology is a unique subject that should be integrated across all phases of medical education. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 21 No. 02 April’22 Page : 249-261
Highlights
Background and Historical PerspectivesThere have been substantial changes in medical education over the past few decades 2, 3
Another critical perspective for choosing pharmacology is because the authors hailed from Bangladesh and originally were pharmacologists and clinicians working in Bangladeshi medical schools as pharmacology educators
A study conducted on YEAR III-V Bangladeshi medical students revealed that students of all years suffered from a lack of confidence in choosing the right drugs for prescription and a lack of knowledge in the proper selection of medicines like antimicrobials 56
Summary
There have been substantial changes in medical education over the past few decades 2, 3. Flexner had huge concern over how the medical schools were running and how the curriculum was planned He was dissatisfied and wrote that there is “enormous over-production of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners.”. There was a distinct division between basic sciences and clinical education in medical schools during the post-Flexner era. Due to this barrier, students would not find relevance in what they were taught in introductory science classes 7. Students believe that the curriculum does not prepare them adequately for clinical practice 2 In their perspective paper, Mehta et al (2013) narrated the shortcomings of modern medical education. Curricular reforms in medical schools are required to accommodate the rapid availability of information, changing needs of the society, changing demographics, and healthcare advancements 16, 17
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