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Wendy Glauser’s recent piece outlined barriers for medical curricula to meet emerging health challenges.(1) However, trainees are helping to reshape education from the ground up to address an increasingly complex practice environment. Complexity should be embraced, as it reflects our richer understanding of illness processes, social adaptations, and myriad determinants of health.
Early introduction of emerging issues avoids blindspots that could perpetuate systematic neglect of important determinants of health as doctors progress in their careers.(2) Luckily, there are multiple new models for innovative medical education that can effectively integrate policy, public health, and clinical medicine to better prepare future leaders to tackle complexity with analytical and problem-solving skills.
For example, last month, the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations launched their vision for climate health curricula in every medical school, worldwide, by 2020.(3) With ample foresight, the Canadian Federation of Medical Students pushed for faculties of medicine to ‘comprehensively address’ climate health topics in all curricula with their 2016 position paper.(4)
The Global Health Emergency Medicine group at the University of Toronto is working with journalism fellowship graduates to lead several initiatives to study and scale-up practical, hands-on advocacy skills for medical trainees.(5) Elsewhere, public health residents at McMaster Unive...
Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.