Critical evaluation of the seminar

Abstract

The conference was opened by Professor Yvo Nuyens, the Chairman of the Planning Committee, with a brief account of the genesis of the seminar. Reference was made to the international conference on sociology held in Yablona, Poland, in 1973, under the auspices of Professor Magdalena Sokolowska and her colleagues from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and to the meetings of the Medical Sociology Research Committee of the International Sociological Association in Toronto in 1974, both of which included papers on the training of medical sociologists and their roles in medical education. Professor Nuyens went on to state that these two meetings had generated such discussion and interest in the subject that the decision emerged to hold an international conference devoted to these particular themes and in the past few days, we have been engaged here in an enterprise which might best be described as the development of a sociology of medical sciology. Nuyens, in his introduction, emphasized that the discussion should focus upon future training programs and how these might be changed or enlarged to accommodate the increasing demands being made upon medical sociology and medical sociologists — demands for involvement in the operation of health care programs, health care planning, policy-making and the involvement of sociologists in the activities of various pressure groups ranging from consumer representative organizations through action groups to participation in a variety of bodies representing the interests and activities of the medical profession and other health care practitioners — as well as the increasingly important contribution which medical sociologists make towards the training of medical students.