Preanesthetic Assessment 1

The primary mission of the medical school is to create new doctors. Once the medical student has received his or her doctorate, the medical school's interest in, and acceptance of, responsibility for the continued professional development of the physician ceases almost entirely. Yet, with scientific advances in medicine increasing exponentially and the inevitable erosion of memory with time, teachings from our schools of medicine become increasingly irrelevant, forgotten, or both. To maintain competence, the physician must continuously re-educate him- or herself. CME-Continuing Medical Education-will probably never attain the status of the medical school's degree-granting undergraduate program, but medical schools and their faculties must recognize their responsibility, not creating competent physicians but also for maintaining that com­ only for petence. is the product of a Continuing Medical Education program This volume initiated by the Department of Anesthesiology at the Albert Einstein Col­ lege of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center. Our Department of Anes­ thesiology has historically been, and continues to be, unusually active in post-doctoral education through regional and national conferences and symposia. We recognized, however, that programs that bring physicians together in one location for a limited menu of lectures, questions, and discussion reach only a fraction of the potential audience of anesthesiolo­ gists. Such programs, as valuable as they are, by their very structure exclude more anesthesiologists than they include.