Describes how a rise in rates for medical malpractice insurance is forcing some physicians to suspend their practices, shrinking the pool of instructors for medical students. (EV)

Reports that Harvard University Medical School is considering policy changes that would ease financial restrictions in its conflict-of-interest standards for faculty researchers. Supporters argue that such changes are necessary to attract and retain top researchers, but ethicists warn that as collaborations between industry and academic medicine…

Reports that prominent medical professors are being solicited away from medical schools by large honoraria or high remuneration offered by commercial companies that provide continuing education services to physicians on the Internet. Suggests that medical schools consider potential partnerships with dot-com companies to develop continuing…

Increasingly, professional schools are addressing the issue of whether a financially successful program has a responsibility to support other, less financially successful programs, and how university fund raisers can assure donors that their gifts will benefit specific programs and not be siphoned into others. Law and business schools, often…

Two foreign medical schools plan to open branch campuses in the United States. Opponents, including the American Medical Association and a physician group, argue that allowing unaccredited medical schools to operate here could jeopardize health care. The two institutions are distinctly different: a for-profit school in the West Indies, and a…

Factors related to the decline in applications for medical school include costs of medical education, student's desire to begin earning money quickly, publicity about the high cost of malpractice insurance and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the medical professions, and the perception that there is a continuing overabundance of doctors.…

Drexel University (Pennsylvania) has agreed to manage Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, now known as MCP Hahnemann University (Pennsylvania) in a unique arrangement designed to save the latter institution from bankruptcy. Drexel will administer the institution until summer 2001, when it will decide to either merge or part ways. (MSE)

First-year enrollments of minority (American Indian, Hispanic, and black) medical students declined from 1995 to 1996, endangering efforts to achieve a diverse physician workforce. Some institutions are recruiting minorities aggressively and making an added effort to support their persistence. Many minority medical students plan to work in poor…

As nurse practitioners increasingly move into practice areas once reserved for primary-care physicians, and as medical schools move more toward general practice and primary care, medical and nursing students are competing for a limited number of slots in which they can receive on-the-job clinical instruction. With professional boundaries…

The Brown University (Rhode Island) medical school curriculum content remains the same, but students must now demonstrate proficiency in relationships with patients, both real and simulated. In addition to traditional skill areas, students must demonstrate competency in effective communication, moral reasoning and ethical judgment, lifelong…