Medical Education for YouTube Generation

There have been great changes in medical education environment during the 20th century due to advances in biological sciences, increasing demands from health services (Bleakley et al., 2011; Cooke et al., 2006), and in the past two decades dynamic development of information and communication technologies (ICT) (Masic et al., 2011). They have increased the efficiency of learning and promoted the implementation of evidence-based practice (Howick, 2011; Tilson et al., 2011). For the first time in the history of mankind electronic repositories of medical knowledge started to be available in the public domain (Cullen, 2006; Taylor, 2006; Westwood, 2001). At the end of a century of evolution and changes the scope of medical education had grown enormously (Platt et al., 1999; Koschmann, 1995). At present, most of medical students belong to the generation grown up with modern information and communication technologies, referred to as YouTube generation, Generation Y, Millennials, Generation Next, Net Generation (Borges et al., 2006; Farnan et al., 2008). Internet-based technologies have become part of our daily lives and dramatically changed the interaction between physicians-in-training, educators and the world of knowledge, thus offering new challenges and opportunities (Shamji & Law, 2011; Ruiz et al., 2006). At the global level, there are some attempts to propose a concept of global health education with key indicators to evaluate and monitor educational interventions (Bozorgmehr et al., 2011). Watching the phenomenon of globalization, one has to admit that healthcare services and medical education cannot escape its impact. A new concept of a global profession of medicine has been in the limelight for the past decade with an urgent need to specify a set of core competences for doctors, regardless of where they had been trained (Schwarz, 2001; Celletti et al., 2011).