National Fund for Medical Education

Support for Innovations in Learning

The NFME has supported health professions education's immediate needs: influencing educators, health professions education's immediate needs: influencing educators, health professionals-in-training, and , ultimately, the care Americans deserve. It has participated in new efforts to understand patients' needs, promote continual improvements in practitioners' skills, and enhance teaching methods at the nation's medical and nursing schools. The NFME has been a partner in:

• Bringing nursing and medical students into the same classroom. The NFME helped design as interdisciplinary course at Oregon Health Sciences University that included shared problem-solving, communication, and decision-making.

• Studying specialist physician retraining in primary care. In partnership with Blue Cross of California and the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco, the NFME prepared a paper and surveyed physicians and managed care organizations about retraining in California. The NFME and its partners then sponsored a statewide conference to present results of this research to managed care organizations, physician professional associations, and medical educators. The California Academy of Family Physicians and the California Hispanic Medical Association also served as co-sponsors of the conference.

• Making students aware of cost-containment and their relationship to medical outcomes. This program at Case Western Reserve University highlighted a subject that receives little attention in most health professions schools.

• Encouraging the development and expansion of health professions education programs that help students learn an approach to health care that integrates the Psychosocial and biomedical aspects of health. In this program, the NFME managed the funding for the Pew Health Professions Commission and the Fetzer Institute.