The clinical teaching unit in transition.

The clinical teaching unit (CTU), a distinctively Canadian concept, has served Canadian academic medicine well over the past 30 years. Times have changed considerably since the concept was first defined by the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges in 1962. Many proposals and ideas of Evans, Chute and Morley in their description of the CTU, clinical education and the practice of medicine remain relevant today. The concept of learning by doing, under supervision, in a relatively controlled academic environment is still valid. However, we must either expand our concept of the traditional CTU to make it consistent with the contemporary broad practice of medicine or maintain the current model as complementary, but not necessarily central, to an expanded paradigm of clinical education.