ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the 1960s action was urgently required in two wide areas of medical education and training.1 First, there was a need to review the purpose of each stage of medical education: the preclinical and clinical phases of the undergraduate curriculum, the graduate (preregistration) and postgraduate programs. From such review the content of each stage might be discussed in more concrete terms, changes made, and responsibility for standards assigned among the universities, the hospitals, and the professional Colleges. Second, there was a recognized and acute need for postgraduate education and training programs in the hospitals, particularly in those hospi tals that were labeled "nonteaching," in which the great majority of special ist trainees were employed, and which, as the district hospitals of the future, might also be expected to provide the professional focus of medicine for public health and for general practitioners.
