Gasper1
Michelle Gasper
PCH 358-01W
Assignment #1
The Flexner Report of 1910 was one of the most influential documents on the health care system, and has contributed to how our health care system is run today. The Flexner Report follows three main policies in order to ensure for a more improved medical system. These three policies are: providing standardized medical education in the United States, to establish medical care as a market commodity, and finally granting sovereignty to the medical profession, the American Medical Association, over the organization and financing of medical care. By following these policies, Abraham Flexner, the creator of the Flexner report, believed the health care system would only begin to prosper by being held to higher standards. In some ways Flexner was correct in his theory of how to better our healthcare system, in other ways people may have disagreed with these policies and have looked at them as discriminatory. No matter which way you look at it, the Flexner report certainly had an extremely important impact on America’s healthcare system.
Flexner’s first policy that he put into action was establishing standardized medical education in the United States. Abraham Flexner was indeed a driven man, and cared a great deal about our healthcare system and how it could be improved. Over the span of 18 months, he visited over 155 different medical schools around the US, and while at each school he had five major areas that he observed. These five areas were: the school's entrance requirements, the size and training quality of the faculty, the size of endowment and tuition, the quality of laboratories, and the availability of a teaching hospital, whose doctors would serve as clinical teachers. Upon examination of these five criteria, Flexner reached out to the American Medical Association and shared his concerns with them, and asked them to raise the admission and graduation standards for medical schools as well as to stick to the “protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research”.(The Flexner Report, Medical Education in the US and Canada) The American Medical Association decided to take matters into their own hands and call of the government to mandate standardized medical education. The AMA then proceeded to create the Council on Medical Education (CME) in 1904 in order to promote the transformation of medical education. There were two primary reform initiatives: the standardization of education requirements prior to entering into any formal medical school, an ideal medical curriculum consisting of two years training in lab sciences followed by two years of clinical rotations in teaching hospitals. Because of the guidelines that many schools failed to meet, nearly half of the medical schools decided to merge, or closed down all together. Flexner believed by achieving these goals would make for a more improved healthcare system and eliminate some of the crowding/over populated medical schools. Flex...
