However, health care professionals today face many challenges that require an open mind and critical thinking about issues facing both clients and practitioners as we move rapidly into the 21st Century. One important challenge to us as educators is how to help our students move from thinking based on habit, and rigidly held positions, to more open-minded positions based on a broad perspective of an increasingly more complicated society. Using the basic precept that in order to think critically one needs a problem to solve or an issue to confront, we can take any one, or a variety of controversial and ethical issues into the classroom for examination by our students. I find it very useful to allow each student to choose their own topic for a written report, and to use class discussion for some broad issues. However, there is a problem to be confronted first.
Many students lack even general knowledge about issues and problems in health care.
This starts them reading one or more major urban newspapers or USA Today, perhaps a national news magazine, and listening to, or watching, the evening news. In-class surveys have shown that these are not usual behaviors for this population of students, who report that they are too busy, and they are not interested in news or politics beyond their local communities. My surveys show that few of them are registered to vote. I find that most of my students cannot name the Attorney General, or the Secretary of State. Few of them know there is a Surgeon General, and they have little knowledge about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.