Changing world, changing doctors, changing education!

Abstract

Future developments in the community will underline the need to provide a community-oriented health care system in which public health doctors collaborate with general practitioners, as the hospital-based health care system that currently exists in many countries will not be able to solve the problems of health care in the future. Increasing populations, increasing mobility all over the world, spread of new diseases (aids/hiv and ebola virus for example) will have great impact on our societies and the expectations of the societies and patients of their doctors. Most societies in which our young doctors will serve, expect their adults to live on healthily into their 80th. That means that the society of the future will be a double aging society (more older people who are older than before) with all concomitant burdens of degenerative chronic diseases. How should we handle the problems in 2025 when our capacities stay restricted to what we once learned in 2002? For this purpose the medical faculties have to change their curricula. The medical faculties will have to educate different kind of doctors, different from the doctors they have educated for many decades. These doctors must collaborate with other health care workers in primary health care teams. Collaboration in these teams requires mutual trust, win-win situations and agreement on the principles of health promotion programs. Only by collaboration between public health care and individual, personal health care it will be possible to achieve unity for health for all people. In the future both public health doctors and general practitioners need each other's complementary support and since they share the same area of interest, they need to work together.