Comparative Education in the Health Professions

As the academe in health professions institutions pursue educational reforms that anchors on the systems approach to healthcare, collaborative efforts are essential to establish more responsive and dynamic professional education systems. This paper highlights comparative education as a tool to strengthen health professions education around the world by reviewing previous and the most recent studies done, and showcase how this can improve the current pedagogical landscape. Through comparative education, a holistic approach to health professions education ensures that the learner’s training is not only comprehensive but also responsive to the dynamic needs of the country, the region, and the rest of the world by the sharing of best practices, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration. The opportunities that international comparative education provide to the health professions education include the sharing of best practices and difficulties encountered, and the enhanced viewpoint from considering different perspectives. On the other hand, the main challenges include ethnocentrism and the limited resources that majority of institutions face globally especially those from the low- and middle-income countries. Truly, once the lessons learned from comparative educational engagements are integrated into the philosophical and educational foundations in our medical schools, then we are one step closer to becoming responsive to the call for a more holistic and systems – centered health professions education.