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Chapter Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has initiated rapid fundamental changes to the delivery of assessment in medical education and this emphasizes the need for a holistic programmatic approach to assessment to ensure quality and foster continuous improvement.
This chapter focuses on future assessment developments and the acceleration resulting from the pandemic.
It also highlights the impact on teaching and learning and how this is an opportunity to develop better learning and assessment methods.
The impact on accreditation processes and how technology will shape these responses are also considered.
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ORIENTATION TO THE CHAPTER
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In this book, we have presented discussions of the latest thinking on a range of issues that are relevant to the quality assurance (QA) of assessment in medical education and most likely across all health professions education programs. The timing was interesting because the book was commissioned just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and most chapters were written during the first wave of the pandemic. Chapters cover the rationale for assessment QA, the roles and responsibilities of QA assessors, assessment of knowledge and clinical competence, Work Based Assessment (WBA), programmatic assessment, use of technology, and standardization. The publisher challenged us with the question, How meaningful are these topics in an era of major disruption to “normal business”? Therefore, this final chapter draws together elements of these discussions in the context of the changes forced by the major disruption experienced by all. Are there lessons to be learned from these experiences? We address the question, to what degree will the disruption lead to longer-term changes to assessment practices and how they are quality assured? We begin with the recent pandemic as a case study (Case 10-1) and then present comments on the international impact and responses.
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Case 10-1: A Major Disruption
During December 2019, a series of cases with an unusual acute respiratory system disease were identified in one region of the People’s Republic of China. This disease appeared to spread rapidly and to have high complication and mortality rates. By early January 2020, it became clear that there was an outbreak of a potentially new infectious disease, a coronavirus that may have mutated and “jumped” species from other animals to humans. Initially, this was thought to be a problem for this one region of one country, and the world watched while that region went into “lockdown” and reoriented health care toward strict public health measures and expanding acute critical care resources. Health professionals were also getting ill and dying. Medical education almost ceased, and both teaching faculty and more senior students were drawn into providing clinical services. Travel restrictions were imposed within that region and between that region and other parts of the world, but by mid- to late February it was clear that the infection had already spread well beyond the initial region, particularly to international destinations with strong business, family, and therefore travel links ...