In the coming months we shall commission further articles covering all aspects of disaster management, including SARS, the role of critical care in complex medical operations, educational programmes for intensivists, communication, leadership and victim support, as well as further first-hand experiences in mass casualty situations.
This study adds further evidence to the debate as to the relative contribution of medical student characteristics [the people we select], undergraduate medical education provision [the educational programmes they follow], the differences in medical school output [the doctors we produce] and their career preferences [the careers they will follow].
All learners are tracked through administrative databases (eg, medical school admissions and educational programmes databases, medical licencing agencies registration databases), which provide basic demographic data (eg, table 1), details of the learner's educational experience at NOSM and selected information on outcomes (eg, provincial health insurance (billing) databases).
Two universities in Sweden, both with undergraduate medical and nursing educational programmes, were chosen as sites for data collection.
However, based on our experience and that of others [ 8- 11], it is apparent that underutilization of this dialogue during SGW occurs during our medical and biomedical science educational programmes, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
For medical teachers learning to design educational programmes which reflect vertical integration, the question is how they can be instructed to articulate integration of clinical and basic sciences.
There are also differences in perspectives between these two educational programmes: nursing education in Sweden covers both behavioural (50%) and biological (50%) sciences, while 90% of the medical education is biologically oriented [ 35].
These actions were mostly related to systems redesign, i.e. improvement of information technology, development of new educational programmes and modifications of medical documentation.
Also, educational programmes targeting the public, rescue teams, medical and para-medical personnel as well as the kidney patients should be developed and implemented in advance, describing how to survive and also how one can help others to survive in the case of a disaster [ 85– 85].
