Has Medical Education Metastasized?

Abstract

Efforts to expand medical education through the construction of totally new, coordinated, academic medical centers that included a university-owned teaching hospital large enough to accommodate most of the university's medical educational functions seemed to have ended with the 1960s. The federal government had cut back sharply on new funding of university hospital construction. The public and their local governments had become disenchanted with the costs and effects of education primarily based on tertiary care concentrated in large cities. Students, practitioners, and some medical educators were seeking ways in which student education could be related more closely to the kinds of medical care commonly needed by the people, provided at the place needed. At least for a time, the erain which a university could obtain $100 to $200 million to construct a new, unified medical school and teaching hospital appeared to have come to an end. With pressures for increased output