Response to Flexner, Educational Reform, Social Accountability and Meta-Curriculum

To the Editor: By highlighting social accountability and inequities in health professions education, Padilla and Bell call attention to a critical and timely subject.¹ Health professions education should play an important role in addressing and mitigating health equity. Accreditation standards and other compulsory requirements can sometimes overshadow other critical and occasionally overlooked mandates or duties of health educators and educational systems. Flexner did seem to call attention to the patient as the core driver of educational reform and placed emphasis on the need for students to learn directly from and about the sick in experiential settings.² As teachers, we must remain steadfast and aware of all the places sickness exists and of all the varied manifestations of altered and inequitable health.