Public Health Promotion and Medical Education Reform

All over the world, more than 80% of medical service and public health education are conducted by graduates from local/regional medical schools. Therefore, these schools are facing the pressing demand for better health services, principally due to population growth and greater public health awareness. However, traditional medical education is failing to cope with these challenges, largely because of didactic teaching methods, fragmented curricula, and passive learning, which cannot train our students to become self-directed lifelong learners and qualified healthcare workers. We are also aware that simply expanding the class size of medical schools and opening new medical schools cannot meet this demand. The medical school educators thus implement a series of reforms across every aspect of medical education (e.g. teaching content, style, and methodology), which has been gradually deepened in many majors such as medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health. Otherwise, the outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus emphasizes the vital interplay of public health and medical education disciplines, promoting the integration of public health content into medical education. That is, the better healthcare workers for the future should be responsible for not only disease diagnosis and treatment but also health promotion and disease prevention.

The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the urgent need for healthcare services worldwide that is outstripping the pace of healthcare workforce growth, underlining the necessity of a paradigm shift in medical education. Therefore, the aim of the Research Topic is to provide a comprehensive overview of current reform attempts in education for healthcare workers, mainly (but not exclusively) focusing on the high-quality research studies carried out in local/regional medical schools. In addition, it is being widely accepted that disease prevention and health promotion may be more effective in improving the health status of a population. We thus greatly encourage contributions providing innovative methods and assessment of the incorporation of core public health into the medical curricula. Ongoing and completed Original Research studies are welcome.

Consequently, areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Situation and trends of public health research, practice, and policy.
• Development and evaluation of public health education.
• National and international medical education reform to produce well-trained students and workers: local/regional medical schools.
• Implementation and evaluation of integrating public health content in the medical curricula