Tomorrow's doctors: today's mistakes?

Abstract

Tomorrow's Doctors, published by the General Medical Council of the UK in December 1993, has prompted far-reaching changes to medical education in Britain. We draw attention to some inconsistencies in the document and to those aspects of it that we maintain are undesirable. We question the emphasis in Tomorrow's Doctors on change in view of the unchanging nature of the structure and function of the human body. We doubt the wisdom of exhorting students to learn through curiosity and experiment, such methods being wasteful of time and resources when used in the context of accepted core material. We do not accept that the information overload is an automatic result of traditional methods of delivering education, and we are by no means convinced that the university model is the right one for medical education. In the face of experts being unable to agree on or to define scientific method, we wonder if consideration of this is appropriate in an undergraduate medical course, and we doubt that ethics and criticism are rightly placed in the undergraduate curriculum. The drawbacks of systems-based teaching are considered in the light of the disease process, and we draw attention to the lack of evidence for the document's condemnation of departmental structures and its uncritical espousal of integration. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which these changes have affected anatomy.