National Fund for Medical Education

The History of NFME -- Nearly 50 Years of Excellence

Medical schools in the 1940s operated with small budgets whose costs often exceeded their revenues. In the late '40s, when finances became scarce enough to threaten the existence of some East Coast medical schools, university presidents, including Eisenhower, sought help from American corporations. The newly formed National Fund for Medical Education gained the support of many prominent leaders, including Mary McCleod Bethune, Winthrop Rockefeller, William S. Paley, and Seeley G. Mudd.

Throughout the 1950s, the NFME began making grants to improve teaching methods in medical education. In the 1960s, the NFME supported medical schools' goals of producing more physicians through increased enrollments, more efficient teaching, and medical school expansion. Its grants underwrote the use of new materials, such as video-tapes, and other means of modernizing curricula. Gradually, the NFME began making grants that also addressed medical student attrition, medical school governance, and assessing students' medical competence.

In the early 1970s, the NFME became a leader in promoting efforts to make students aware of the costs of care and the physicians' role in controlling these costs. Among other timely NFME programs in those years were grants to provide special tutorials to assist minority medical students and the development of computerized instruction. Since the 1980s, the NFME has been a force for guiding health professions education toward progressive new ideas, from enhancing provider-patient relationships to overcoming cultural barriers in the treatment of minority patients.

Throughout its lifetime, the National Fund for Medical Education has attracted high-level support from some of America's most established companies and corporate foundations-SmithKline Beecham, Johnson & Johnson Family of Funds, Ford Motor Corporation Fund, Citicorp/Citibank, Eli Lilly Company, CIGNA Foundation, and General Reinsurance Corporation, for example. Support for the NFME's work has also come from such distinguished contributors as Liberty Mutual Insurance Group/ Boston, The Alcoa Foundation, the Hoffman-LaRoche Foundation, the Upjohn Company, and Exxon Corporation, and their executives who have served on the NFME's Board of Directors.