ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the barriers and challenges associated with health promotion and public health teaching. It identifies three main challenges: strengthening the public health curriculum, strengthening the resource base and increasing teacher capacity and skills. The main challenge facing curriculum developers therefore is to ensure clinical relevance, for information learned in context will be more readily retrieved. The teaching of undergraduate public health has always reflected a number of tensions. Debates about the place of public health in the teaching of medical school students go back over a century. Medical faculties are responsible for ensuring that the GMC recommendations on health promotion and public health education are fulfilled. The influential Flexner Report of 1910 entrenched medical sciences at the core of medical training. Departments of public health can and should provide access to trained staff with varied experience in education, health services and clinical research and clinical, social and health promotion services.
