EDITORIAL

Year : 2007  |  Volume : 20  |  Issue : 1  |  Page : 16

Co-Editor's Notes

M Gadon
American Medical Association, Chicago, IL, USA

Correspondence Address:

Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None

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In this issue of Education for Health we transition to a fully on-line, open access format, available at www.educationforhealth.net. Through this process we hope to extend our reach to larger numbers and a wider breadth of professionals in the fields of health professions education, community health and global health policy. Our new format will allow readers to receive email alerts throughout the year for articles in their areas of interest, although we will be continuing to bundle these articles and others into three distinct issues per annum. Each issue will retain our usual format of research articles, brief communications and special features. However, the issues will also contain a group of theme-centered articles. We encourage active feedback from our readers about any of our papers as well as about our new format. Therefore we have installed a discussion feature to this website as well.



This issue continues to have articles that primarily have a focus on health professions education. In subsequent issues, consistent with our change in mission as of November 2005*, the topics covered by the articles in our journal will extend beyond health professional education to include linkages between the service, policy and educational sectors to improve the health of communities.



In this new direction of the journal, we draw your attention to three articles in this issue on partnerships and the role of public health in medical education. In “Innovative medical education: Sustainability through partnership with health programs”, Pemba et al. address a framework for collaboration between a medical institution and local primary health care programs in Kenya. Dow Velarde et al., in “A public health certificate for all medical students: Concepts and strategies”, describe the program initiated by the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in which each medical student receives training in core public health principles and a certificate in Public Health upon graduation. Finally, Oman et al. present an ad hoc partnership among four developed country medical institutions, who were independently working with a Kenyan medical school, and the school itself in their paper “Working collaboratively to support medical education in developing countries: The case of the Friends of Moi University Faculty of Health Sciences”. The coordination by the four schools has allowed for sustainable donor support which has not depended on continued funding from any one school and for a synergistic effect on the curricular support efforts.



We hope that you will use the open access opportunity to share Education for Health with your colleagues from around the world.

Margaret Gadon

Co-Editor Education for Health

* see “mission statement” elsewhere on this website.