Need for medical schools stressed

Medical schools needed to prepare young doctors to practise in an increasingly complex healthcare scene with changing patient and public expectations, and increasing demands from employing authorities.
Professor Dr Tim Neild of Flinders University School of Medicine, Australia, stated this while addressing the opening session of a 5-day international workshop on "Integrated Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning Concepts" here at the University of Health Sciences (UHS) on Tuesday.
This is sixth international workshop arranged by UHS, which aims at capacity building of the medical faculty of the province. Master trainers from various medical and dental colleges as well as institutions of the Punjab are participating in the workshop.
Professor Dr Tim Neild maintained that outcome-based education offered many advantages as it emphasised relevance in the curriculum and accountability, and could provide a clear and unambiguous framework for curriculum planning which had an intuitive appeal. He further said that outcome-based education (OBE) encouraged the teacher and student to share responsibility for learning and it could guide student assessment and course evaluation.
Earlier, explaining the concept of OBE, he said that it was an approach to education in which decisions about the curriculum were driven by the outcomes the students should display by the end of the course. "It is a performance-based approach at the cutting edge of curriculum development, offering a powerful and appealing way of reforming and managing medical education," he said, adding that emphasis was on the product - what sort of doctors would be produced - rather than on the educational process.
Dr Tim Neild also stated that in OBE the educational outcomes were clearly and unambiguously specified. These determined the curriculum content and its organisation, the teaching methods and strategies, the courses offered, the assessment process, the educational environment and the curriculum timetable.
UHS vice-chancellor Professor M.H. Mubbashar said that if medical professionals of international quality were to be produced, then centre to this change was the introduction of professional development programmes and setting up of award and accreditation schemes at both individual and institutional levels. This would promote modernisation of medical education and medical careers, he opined.
Professor Mubbashar congratulated the participants on setting up departments of medical education in their colleges and conducting 33 workshops for other faculty members.