ABSTRACT
Medical students world-wide are commonly asked to produce patient information leaflets or pamphlets somewhere along their journey to becoming a doctor. There are many reasons why this is a useful activity. Curricula that include learning indigenous languages may use multilingual pamphlets to assess students’ grasp of language in context. Others use producing pamphlets to teach how medical terminology and explanations should be simplified for the general public’s understanding. In South Africa, pamphlets also have an ideological and sociopolitical function. The fall of apartheid ushered in the era of Primary Health Care, a patient-centred, community-orientated view of health, and the predominantly biomedical model of medical curricula was replaced with a biopsychosocial approach (Macdonald 1995). This new model foregrounds an explicit focus on human rights, advocacy, and health promotion, which boosted the popularity of pamphlet-making activities. However, proponents of these two models hold different and deeply rooted ideas about ‘what counts’ as knowledge in a medical curriculum. This hegemonic struggle results in tension between what students are taught in the classroom, and what they experience in the wards. As a consequence, it is not uncommon to find a reluctant or even negative attitude towards ‘yet another pamphlet’ amongst both students and clinical staff.
