Medical Education in 21st century

医学教育是一个长期的过程，医学教育工作者必须考虑医学教育在未来几年的效果。21世纪世纪要求医生发挥更广泛的作用，医学教育必须培养有能力承担这些角色的医生。关于医学教育的一个特殊问题是如何在社会中准备最佳数量的医生。在日本，1986年，厚生省的特别委员会考虑了这个问题，并建议将医学院的入学人数减少10%。最近阿金厚生省成立了另一个委员会，考虑进一步减少，我们检查了医疗教育计划，医生人数，发现有许多因素需要考虑，根据不同的假设，未来的预测是完全不同的。我们调查了全球趋势的医生劳动力政策，即使在发达国家也没有达成共识。例如英国将增加医学院的招生人数，而德国的趋势相反。我们还对执业医师的工作条件进行了问卷调查，发现现实与理想的工作条件，如咨询时间，病人数量和工作时间有很大的差异。我们还注意到，未来将更详细地研究医疗成本与医生数量之间的关系。

Medical education is a long process and medical educators have to consider effect of medical education for comming years. 21st century requires wider roles for physicians and medical education have to prepare physicians who are capable to assume those roles. One special issue related to medical education is how to prepare optimal numbers of physicians in the society.In Japan in 1986, special committee within the Ministry of Health and Welfare considered this issue and 10% reduction of entering class of medical schools was recommended. Recently agin the Ministry of Health and Welfare established another committee to consider further reduction and we examined medical education programs, numbers of physicians and find out there are many elements to be considered and according to different assumptions future forecast is quite different.We investigated global trend on physician work force policy and there is no consensus even in developed countries. For example U.K.will increase the number of medical schools intake on the contrary of trend of Germany.We also examined the practicing physicians working conditions in questionaires and found out great discrepancy between reality and ideal settings, e.g. consultation time, number of patients and working hours. We also noted there will be more detailed examination of relationship between medical care cost and number of physicians in future.