Medical teachers expressed their grave concern over shortcomings of traditional medical teaching methods and said medical faculty needed to respond decisively and appropriately to the rapid changes in medical curriculum to ensure that the graduates were well trained to meet the challenges of medical practice in the years to come.
They were speaking at the concluding ceremony of a 24-day course for medical faculty arranged by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in collaboration with University of Health Sciences (UHS) under its Professional Competency Enhancement Programme for Teachers (PCEPT), here on Tuesday. Around 35 medical teachers from different medical colleges of the province participated in the course.
Medical teachers have asserted that teachers in medical colleges need to change their own beliefs, behaviour, perception and assumptions about teachings and learning in order to provide quality medical education to medical students. Professor Arif Rashid Khawaja said.
"Medical education, with its intensive pattern of basic science lectures followed by an equally exhausting clinical teaching programme is rapidly becoming ineffective, given the new technology and the rapidly changing demands of future practice." Professor Ibrahim Khalid from University of Education Lahore said that in medical colleges, the emphasis was on passive acquisition of knowledge rather than on its discovery through curiosity and experiment.
Students have become recipients of information transmitted by teachers. He said that establishment of medical education departments in many colleges and initiation of teacher's training programmes had led to increased interest in teaching methodologies and sporadic research activities in medical education. Later, the VC UHS distributed certificates among the participants of the workshop.