ABSTRACT
The role of health professionals throughout the world is undergoing significant changes due to the reorientation of healthcare systems towards the World Health Organization’s (WHO) goal of ‘Health for All’ through primary healthcare (PHC). When considering the development of the health professional, the WHO (1985) asserted that health personnel were not appropriately trained for the tasks they were expected to perform in society, and that the planning of their education remained isolated from consumer needs and the needs of the healthcare service (WHO, 1993). Health professionals in hospital-based education have minimal preparation in the wider aspects of health, and they have little opportunity to learn how to address the social, economic and political forces affecting health. In the words of McWhinney ‘A student whose sole experience of illness has been in hospital, has seen a small fraction of the illness of the people, and in hospital the patient is isolated from the context of his or her illness, namely the family and social dimensions of the ill health’ (1980: p. 189). The conventional method of training students in hospitals is thus no longer regarded as an appropriate method of developing graduates, who should be responsive to the needs of the society as a whole. Several innovative teaching approaches to the education of health professionals have been proposed. Community-based education (CBE) seems one promising approach to enhance the relevance of education to the needs of the population, as CBE is founded on a PHC philosophy.
