Opinions of physicians about the content relevance of M.D curriculum and their professional needs

Background and purpose: Medical education is a complex process that intends to train the students in situation like they should work in future such as hospital, clinics, health care center and theire oficess. So, first, it should be clear that, how much the curriculum of medical education meets the professional needs. Method: Questionnaires were designed and distributed among 125 physicians (GP) with one to tow years experience. The questionnaire scaled from 1 to 10 (at least relevance to the most relevance). Results: General practitioners graded the relevancy of content of medical curriculum to professional needs as 7.03±1.56 . They mentioned that the ratio of ambulatory medical education to bedside one was nearly 2.5 to 1 . Approximately 73% of them pointed that their needs to ambulatory education were fulfilled: low and very low. Whereas 71% of them mentioned that the amount of fulfillment of bed side education were: enough and very enough. Conclusion: This study showed that the contents of medical curriculum are not completely relevant to GP needs, especialy in basic science. The recommendation is that there needs to be a shift in the emphasis from hospital to the community, and particularly to ambulatory centers. Keywords: MEDICAL EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL NEEDS, CURRICULUM, OPINION.