The content of undergraduate health professional courses: a topic largely ignored?

Considerable debate has occurred about educational processes within undergraduate courses for healthcare professionals. Less attention appears to have been directed to issues of curriculum content.This paper examines the potential influence of curriculum content on a number of outcomes, and examines the methods that can be used determine curriculum content. The balance between different content areas in a curriculum has the potential to affect allocation of human resources, research capacity and output, and hence the power base of discipline groups. Changes to the balance of content will therefore be sensitive, and threatening to some groups. While the optimal way to determine curriculum content would be on the basis of evidence from experimental studies, such studies have not been conducted. Opinion-based approaches have been commonly used. While such processes demonstrate increasing commitment to determining content that is most relevant to producing good clinicians, the results depend on the stakeholders involved. Despite the considerable difficulties in conducting rigorous research concerning curriculum content, there is a need to develop a research agenda in this area.