Tomorrow’s Doctors and diversity issues in medical education

Teaching ‘cultural diversity’ to medical students in the UK became a priority following the publication of Tomorrow’s Doctors (General Medical Council, [GMC] 1993). This was in the context of increasing recognition in the UK and North America of the need to acknowledge variation in patient needs related to their ethnic background and the influence that cultural perspectives have on health as well as increasing diversity within society and changing expectations of doctors (Dogra et al. 2010). Previously, medical schools included ethnicity more in the context of teaching about health inequalities rather than about how health practitioners, including doctors, could meet the needs of a diverse range of patients including those with different ethnicities (for example: University of Leicester 1993). Tomorrow’s Doctors (GMC 1993) contained the recommendations for undergraduate medical education issued by the Education Committee of the GMC. In developing their recommendations, the Education Committee concluded that the time for change had come and medical schools needed to ensure that future doctors treated patients from all backgrounds equitably (GMC 1993). In this commentary we critique each of the three iterations of Tomorrow’s Doctors (1993, 2003, 2009) with respect to diversity education and discuss how these documents may have both helped and hindered this. We conclude with some recommendations.