PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Med.
Sec. Healthcare Professions Education
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1666718
Undergraduate Medical Education Amidst Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity
Provisionally accepted
- Baptist University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Memphis, United States
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Undergraduate medical education, especially in the United States, is being shaped by an environment that is changing at an unprecedented pace, creating new challenges for institutions, faculty, and students. For medical education to adapt to the changing environment, influencing factors must be identified and categorized, allowing for the development of strategies that work within the new landscape. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) is a method to analyze the factors driving change. Here, we apply the VUCA framework to undergraduate medical education, highlighting key influencing factors including artificial intelligence, decentralized approaches to learning, expansion of medical schools, and new demands on faculty and students. The goal is to identify how these influences are impacting medical education allowing for creative and innovative strategies to be employed that mitigate disruptive forces and take advantage of new opportunities to the benefit all stakeholders.
Keywords: Medical Education, artificial intelligence, VUCA, education technology, Faculty retention
Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Camarata, Spizzieri and Kulkarni. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Troy Camarata, troy.camarata@baptistu.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.