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| Keith D. Lindor , M.D., professor of medicine, dean of Mayo Medical School. |
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Mayo Medical School (MMS) is pioneering a fundamentally new way of educating physicians for the 21st century. Our reason: We see health care challenges ahead that will require far more creative, inter-disciplinary problem solving from physicians than ever before.
To do the most good for the most people, physicians of the future will need the confidence and competence to fill multiple demanding roles. Among them:
- humane health care leader, both in clinical practice and in the policy arena
- expert, ethical healer able to draw from many healing traditions
- generous and sensitive world citizen who responds to the needs for basic health care wherever they occur
- lifelong learner who consistently takes the initiative to expand his or her knowledge bases
- dual-degree professional who obtains multiple advanced degrees, such as medicine and law; medicine and public health; or medicine and business, and makes a broader positive public impact because of it.
We've redesigned our medical school curriculum to support mastering the skills these roles require. Our overarching goal is to fully prepare physicians to be excellent, compassionate, creative caregivers who are poised for leadership roles in health care. We've emphasized the link between leadership and superlative medical practice by starting the first year of MMS with a three-week-long course in leadership development. This change makes explicit a Mayo belief that has always been implicit in MMS medical education: Skillful, visionary leadership improves patient care, research and academic medicine.
Prioritizing patient care is Mayo Clinic's historic calling and foundational value, and rest assured, that hasn't changed. It never will. In fact, under the new curriculum, it's intensified. MMS's clinical-immersion curriculum puts students in meaningful contact with patients nearly every day - from week 1. This way the course of health and disease is never an abstraction at MMS; it's across the street, where 500,000 new patients each year help teach our 42 MMS medical students the best practices of maintaining health and managing disease.
MMS's new curriculum is just one more innovation that our Mayo Clinic heritage prepares us to take. More than 130 years have passed since Dr. William Worrell Mayo settled in Rochester, Minn., and successfully performed one of the first abdominal surgeries in America - and encouraged the upstart idea of collaboratively practicing medicine to improve patient care. It was a bold move, and the right one. So is this.
We hope you agree and that you'll join us for this next innovation in improving health care for the 21st century.
Keith D. Lindor, M.D.
Dean, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine
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