This year the Resilience team attended the Association for Medical Education in Europe’s (AMEE) Conference in Helsinki (The worlds largest international medical education conference) to discuss the future of medical education and this conference did not disappoint.
Instead of accepting long hours and high stress as a right of passage/ inevitable side effect for medical professionals in training, educators are now strongly focused on helping learners build lasting resilience, manage their stress and simplify their workloads using technology.
With that in mind here are important insights from AMEE:
1 Teaching Environments Are Changing.
As Prof. Jolanta Karpinski, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, so eloquently stated in her talk on ‘Competence by Design Cohort Transformation: a roadmap for the changes in Canadian specialty education’, the days of make or break residency programs that focus predominantly on technical skills and ability to work well under pressure, with no regard for soft skills are coming to an end.
Program directors and their preceptors are now looking for ways to reduce the stress of their residents and build programs that focus on empowering students, helping them manage their personal stress, develop their mindfulness, and their bedside manners.
While most of the Program Directors we have had the privilege of working with have always taken this approach it was exciting to see this approach move forward as the new standard.
2 Developing and Assessing Students Soft Skills Requires Innovation
Our first observation naturally leads directly into our second. If we are going to focus on building soft skills such as mindfulness how do we measure a student’s understanding?
As Lawrence Sherman noted in the Plenary presentation one method could be: Patient Involvement in assessment ‘Measure the Treasure !’.
From our experience providing Student Evaluation Software, we have discovered that student self-evaluations provide a great deal of insight into how empowered and confident a student feels as their training progresses.
3 Standardizing Competency Assessments Is The Way Forward.
Thanks to the invention of the internet we have more opportunity than ever to start collaborating globally. The desire to share data, skills and research projects on a global scale is now higher than ever. This is naturally having an impact on Medical Education Programs as students are expecting more geographically fluid training.
As Dr. Ann Wylie, noted in her talk on ‘Global health teaching in medical undergraduate curricula: are we any closer to a consensus of agreed learning outcomes? An international survey of medical educators’ the best way to do this is through standardizing competency assessments.
Based on the fact that we provide Student Evaluation Software that is designed to help program directors standardize their student evaluations and compliance, it should be clear why this topic spoke so strongly to us.
We have always believed that developing standardized evaluation systems that help program directors and preceptors effectively identify learning gaps, identify where learning happens and improve the connection between learners and directors is the key to turning a good program into a great program.
We hope that you enjoyed the conference as much as we did and that you are as excited as we are to see the medical education industry grow and thrive.
Do not hesitate to reach out to us if you would like to explore new ways to improve your programs insights, strategy, and focus.
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