Cultural diversity teaching in the medical undergraduate curriculum

The publication in 1993 of Tomorrow’s Doctors by the General Medical Council (GMC) placed cultural diversity on undergraduate medical school curricula in theUK, although the relevance of the subject tomedical students had been raised some years previously. In the mid-1980s, a questionnaire postal survey of deans of English medical schools found that all of the 18 respondents (out of a possible 23) reported that their schools gave no specific teaching on the cultural aspects of ethnic minority medicine (Poulton et al, 1986). A decade later a survey of postgraduate and undergraduate medical education institutions conducted by the British Medical Association found that little had changed (Robins, 1995). Another decade later and there appears to have been some progress, in that 72% of schools now report some teaching of cultural diversity (Dogra et al, 2005). However, the number of respondents reporting that their school is teaching the subject compares less favourably with the USA (Flores et al, 2000), albeit more favourably than with Canada (Azad et al, 2002). There appeared to be a great deal of uncertainty about what constituted cultural diversity teaching. ABSTRACT