Physicians must feel obliged to collaborate with other health professionals and to use systematic approaches for promoting, maintaining, and improving the health of individuals and populations. They must be knowledgeable about the risk factors for disease and injury, must understand how to utilize disease and injury prevention practices in the care of individual patients, must promote healthy behaviors through counseling individual patients and their families and public education and action, must actively support traditional public health practices in their communities, and must be advocates for improving access to care for everyone, especially those who are members of traditionally underserved populations. They must understand the economic, psychological, occupational, social, and cultural factors that contribute to the development and/or perpetuation of conditions that impair health. In caring for individual patients, they must apply the principles of evidence-based medicine and cost effectiveness in making decisions about the utilization of limited medical resources. They must be committed to working collaboratively with other physicians; other health care professionals (including administrators of hospitals, health care organizations, and systems of care); and individuals representing a wide variety of community agencies. As members of a team addressing individual or population-based health care issues, they must be willing both to provide leadership when appropriate and to defer to the leadership of others when indicated. They must acknowledge and respect the roles of other health professionals in providing needed services to individual patients, populations, or communities.

For its part the medical school must ensure that before graduation a student will have demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the faculty, the following:

• Knowledge of the important non-biological determinants of poor health and of the economic, psychological, social, and cultural factors that contribute to the development and/or continuation of maladies
  
  
• Knowledge of the epidemiology of common maladies within a defined population, and the systematic approaches useful in reducing the incidence and prevalence of those maladies
  
  
• The ability to identify factors that place individuals at risk for disease or injury, to select appropriate tests for detecting patients at risk for specific diseases or in the early stage of disease, and to determine strategies for responding appropriately
  
  
• The ability to retrieve (from electronic databases and other resources), manage, and utilize biomedical information for solving problems and making decisions that are relevant to the care of individuals and populations
  
  
• Knowledge of various approaches to the organization, financing, and delivery of health care
  
  
• A commitment to provide care to patients who are unable to pay and to advocate for access to health care for members of traditionally underserved populations