Message from the President

The beginning of any new endeavor is exciting and the Foundation is especially so, because it provides the opportunity to make a difference in the quality of health care for people in many parts of the world. This opportunity flows from our charge, which is to support ECFMG in its goal of promoting excellence in international medical education. I am pleased to play a part as we make plans to accomplish this mission.

The choices we make now are important, because they will shape the Foundation's activities for the foreseeable future. Many of our efforts during the past year have centered on how to apply FAIMER's resources to maximize their impact on medical education and health care. I have benefited from several discussions of the Board of Directors, and their guidance has been invaluable in determining the nature and scope of our activities. These discussions have identified a number of ways in which FAIMER can have a significant impact on medical education worldwide.

One of our goals is to become a leading source of reliable and objective information on the world's medical schools. Current, detailed information on the schools from which physicians graduate is essential to understanding the relationship between medical education and the quality of health care in the communities served by these physicians. By gathering, maintaining, and making such information freely available, FAIMER seeks to provide resources on medical education to students, physicians, medical schools, and credentialing organizations. Such resources will facilitate research on medical education. Our first initiative in this area has been to develop the International Medical Education Directory and to make it available to all via the Internet.

FAIMER also seeks to create and enhance educational resources for those who teach physicians. FAIMER's programs for international medical educators strive to develop faculty that produce physicians capable of improving health care and the health of communities. Mechanisms for change are local, and FAIMER's educational programs aim to create local faculty resources and local working models for teaching, evaluation, and curricular change that will have an ongoing influence on medical education in the region.

Finally, we will pursue research opportunities that speak generally to medical education and specifically to the role of international medical graduates in the United States and other countries. We will produce original research and share this knowledge with others working in the field. We will also explore collaborations that allow us to combine our resources with those of appropriate partners. We may fund the research of others who have the potential to produce high quality results, and we hope to serve as a facilitator by convening conferences and other venues for sharing knowledge.

The way in which we approach these activities is critical to their success. Focus and discipline are essential to ensure that our purpose remains clearly articulated. These principles also enhance our ability to have an impact that can be measured. To this end, FAIMER's educational programs will focus on specific geographic regions. These regional foci will allow FAIMER to target specific needs and create a network of local resources to support educational development. In support of them, we must coordinate our efforts. Our programmatic offerings must work in concert to achieve our overall goals and to meet the needs of medical educators. More broadly, we must coordinate our efforts with those of other organizations to achieve maximum effect. Finally, by building evaluation mechanisms into our programs, we will be able to inform future decisions with data about what works and what does not.

The plans made in the past year have provided direction for the years ahead. Although planning will continue to add definition, we can now begin to decide how to match our resources to the tasks at hand, and how to evaluate the results of these efforts. We can also begin to align several successful educational programs, formerly administered by ECFMG, more closely with the activities and principles mentioned above. And, we can start a program of research and resulting informational resources that have the potential to catalyze improvements in international medical education.

John J. Norcini, Ph.D.
President and Chief Executive Officer
Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research