Objectives in Medical Education

On 24 February the General Medical Council held a conference in London on ‘Objectives of Basic Medical Education’. There were a number of reasons for calling the meeting. In September 1975 the Council’s Education Committee issued a report on the subject. It pointed out the extraordinary fact that few medical schools in the United Kingdom had yet defined educational objectives, proceeding as if these were self-evident. The Report urged the Council and other licensing bodies in medical education not only to define their medical curricula at all stages but, further, to introduce methods of assessing whether or not these objectives had been achieved (General Medical Council, 1975). The Merrison Committee (1975) had urged the General Medical Council to take the initiative in encouraging medical schools to define their objectives more precisely: ‘Registration (of doctors) is founded on a certain standard of competence. The GMC must therefore specify this standard of competence and ensure that only the competent are placed in the register, and must be able to refuse to accept that an educational body has inculcated the necessary competence’. The Merrison Committee felt justified to recommend such action to the GMC because it saw regulation as a contract: ‘. . . the public go to the profession for medical treatment because the profession has made sure it will provide satisfactory treatment’. The GMC had received an undoubted assignment, and set about exploring the immediate future for this new responsibility by calling the February meeting. It was well attended by Deans and other representatives from medical schools. They cannot be said to have shown conspicuous enthusiasm, and their ambivalence about objectives is worth exploring.