Changes to medical education over the past 20 years

This article highlights the impact of some influential changes to undergraduate and postgraduate medical education over the past two decades. Figure 1 outlines some of the key junctures that have affected the quality and experience of medical education since 1992.

In 1993, the General Medical Council (GMC) published Tomorrow’s Doctors: Recommendations on Undergraduate Medical Education.1 This report recognised that there were disparities in what medical schools expected students to know on completing their final examinations and recommended that all medical schools moved towards working to a “core curriculum.”

This meant defining and standardising requirements that needed to be satisfied before a final year medical student became a foundation year 1 doctor—then called a preregistration house officer. Tomorrow’s Doctors signalled a change in the delivery of undergraduate medical education, with the emphasis moving from gaining knowledge through “the memorising and reproduction of factual data” and the deployment of lectures or seminars