IMA Senior Fellow and practicing dental surgeon Dr. Jennifer Hibberd sounds the alarm on eroding standards in healthcare education and calls on mentors to step forward.
When you sit in a doctor’s chair or hand your child over to a surgeon, you probably don’t ask where they went to school. You don’t check whether they trained on real patients or spent their clinical years practicing on mannequins. The framed degree on the wall is enough. You trust the system that produced them.
Dr. Jennifer Hibberd thinks you should be asking a lot more. A pediatric dental surgeon, Chief of Dental Surgery at one of Canada’s largest hospital networks, and a clinical instructor at the University of Toronto, Hibberd is embedded at every level of the healthcare training pipeline. Her new commentary in the Journal of Independent Medicine is a call to action for healthcare professionals. Hibberd argues that the system producing tomorrow’s doctors, dentists, and nurses is quietly eroding, and she uses specific institutional examples to show how far the decline has already gone in some programs.
“I wrote this paper because of just a passionate reaction to what’s going on in our healthcare education system.” — Dr. Jennifer Hibberd
Hibberd documents three converging problems:
- The shift from hands-on mentorship to screen-based learning
- Admissions pathways that have relaxed traditional academic standards
- A growing dependence on simulation that keeps students away from real patients well into their senior clinical years
She names the institutions. She names the policies. And she makes a direct case that experienced practitioners need to step back into the role of mentor before the gap between what patients expect and what new graduates can deliver gets any wider. The full commentary lays out what she found and what she believes needs to happen next.
📖 Read and Download the Full Paper
Healthcare: A Wake-Up Call to Reclaim Excellence – Empowering the Next Generation of Physicians, Dentists, and Allied Healthcare Professionals (JIM Vol. 2, No. 3, 2026) — Author: Jennifer Hibberd
👉 Visit the Journal of Independent Medicine to create a free account and download the full article.
