The Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program: Four decades of training physicians as agents of change.

Abstract

The 1960s were a transformative decade in the history of the United States: the civil rights movement, opposition to the war in Vietnam, environmentalism, and a host of other causes inspired an entire generation of citizens to become more active in shaping the world around them. At the same time, the government was expanding tremendously with the establishment of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to help provide health care to America’s elderly and poor. Physicians were looking closely at these historic events and noting that the medical community had yet to come to terms with this new world of activism [1]. Among them were five medical school professors, who, after gathering at a national meeting in the late 1960s and noting the detached and passive model of medical practice promulgated in medical education at the time, proposed a pilot program called the Clinical Scholars Program (CSP) to train physicians to become agents of change, not only in the clinic and in the hospital, but also in communities, in classrooms, and in the halls of power [2]. For the first three years of its existence (1969-1972), the program was based at five universities and funded jointly by the Carnegie Corporation and the Commonwealth Fund. In 1972, it found a new home in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), an organization whose recent philanthropic focus on hospitals and medical care coincided with the CSP’s aims of improving the quality of American health care [3, 4]. While the leadership, participating institutions, and specific structure of the program have changed over the past four decades, the objectives have remained largely the same: to provide nonbiological training to physicians in a variety of specialties to expand access to health services, improve quality of care, and develop a base of evidence to inform national health care policy [3]. After training 1,200 scholars over the past 45 years, the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program is accepting its final cohort in 2014 [5]. It leaves behind a legacy of inspiring two generations of physicians to venture beyond the clinic and the hospital to be agents of change for the health care of all Americans.