- Introduce "meducide" to describe systematic destruction or incapacitation of medical education in armed conflict, highlighting its distinct harm to training and health workforce pipelines.
- Argue that attacks on medical schools and teaching hospitals cause long term public health harm affecting patient care, population health and post conflict recovery.
- Call for separate documentation, protection as critical civilian health infrastructure, inclusion in humanitarian planning, cross border faculty networks and conflict adapted curricula.
MedEdPublish (2016). 2026 Jun 18;16:23. doi: 10.12688/mep.21604.1. eCollection 2026.
ABSTRACT
Wars and armed conflicts are widely recognised as a threat to health systems, yet the destruction of medical education is still too often treated as a secondary educational disruption. This opinion article argues that attacks on medical schools, teaching hospitals, clinical placements, accreditation systems and faculty pipelines should be understood as a distinct form of long-term public health harm. I propose the term “meducide” to describe the systematic destruction, dismantling or incapacitation of medical education during war, whether by direct attack or by structural conditions that render medical training impossible. The concept builds on existing scholarship on attacks on education, structural violence and health workforce fragility, while highlighting what is distinctive about medical education. It captures not only the destruction of medical schools and teaching hospitals but also the broader erosion of the conditions necessary to train future healthcare. Therefore, it sits at the intersection of higher education, health service delivery, professional regulation and the future health workforce. Naming Meducide does not replace careful empirical documentation or legal assessment of intent. Rather, it offers a precise conceptual language for recognising a recurring pattern: when medical education is destroyed, the effects extend beyond students and universities to patient care, population health, post-conflict recovery and health system sovereignty. The article calls for medical education to be documented separately in conflict monitoring, protected as critical civilian and health infrastructure, included in humanitarian and reconstruction planning, and supported through global recognition, cross borders faculty networks, conflict-adapted curricula and sustainable clinical training pathways.
PMID:42728971 | PMC:PMC13560647 | DOI:10.12688/mep.21604.1
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