[Priority objective of medical education]. / Obiettivo prioritario dell'educazione medica.

PURPOSE: To analyze the Best Evidence Medical Education approach (BEME) in relation to the need of improving the quality of education in medical faculties through strictly controlled forms of experiments. MATERIALS AND METHOD: Starting from the analysis of several Medical Education Centers in different Faculties of Medicine, their objectives, activities and quality control systems have been extrapolated in order to point out how institutions identify and control introduced changes. More in detail, a comparison between two italian Centers for Medical Education has been carried out: the one of Bari, which has been the first one in Italy, and the most recent one, at the Campus Bio-Medico, in Rome. CONCLUSIONS: A tendency to apply the growing cultural acquisitions and the new criteria of economy and management to the medical field is developing, which asks for a particular attention to the quality control and to the cost-benefit analysis. Evidence based medicine tries therefore to validate the diagnostic and therapeutic decisions on the basis of experiments whose methodology belongs to the controlled clinical trials' model. These, despite some blind areas, are still a shared effort of the scientific community to objectify the analysis of a given problem and compare the results. Likewise, Evidence Based Medical Education is an attempt to maintain the need for experimenting effective educational forms without giving up their scientific validation. The Medical Education Centers in the different Faculties may have this research function which makes undergraduate medical education one of the three main aspects of the medical teacher's role: research, care and education.