In February 2019, The Kaiser Permanent health system announced a new kind of medical school.The school would be built “from the ground up”to prepare students for the complexities of the U.S, medical system.The curriculum would emphasize cultural competency, patient and provider well-being, mental health and the elimination of socioeconomic disparities in the medical system.

Students would see patients right away, and hands-on learning would replace many lectures.What’s more, the first five graduating classes would pay nothing to attend；Kaiser hoped this would attract students more diverse than the typical U.S.medical school’s.“The school will help shape the future of medical education,”said Kaiser CEO Bernard J.Tyson, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack, about nine months after the announcement.

That future felt a good deal more urgent by the time the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J.Tyson School of Medicine opened its doors in Pasadena, Calif., in July 2020.The COVID-19 pandemic had put almost every facet of normal life on hold, and the medical system was scrambling to treat millions of patients with a new and terrifying disease, the majority of them Black and brown.The streets were filled with people protesting police brutality and racism, as a nation that had long overslept awoke to the disparities woven into almost every American institution.“Our country doesn’t just have a pandemic.It also has a renewed recognition of centuries of racism,”says Kaiser’s founding dean, Dr.Mark Schuster.“We need to make sure that our students understand our history.”

Kaiser isn’t alone there, of course.Medical schools all over the world have had to adjust on the fly, in ways both practical and ideological.First, schools had to figure out how to remotely train students in skills taught hands-on before lockdowns.Then, in the U.S., schools were also forced to grapple with their roles in a health care system that often fails to keep Black and brown patients well.That meant learning how to produce doctors who could help chip away at those disparities moving forward.With no warning and no instruction manual, medical schools are figuring out how to train a generation of postpandemic doctors for a world still taking shape.