gms | German Medical Science

This interactive session will explore trends in medical education and their potential influence on the quality of patient care. In recent years, there has been an important movement to ensure that healthcare is patient-centered. This movement has been driven by the fact that the capacity of the current healthcare systems does not meet the needs of patients and the quality of healthcare is often compromised. According to the Institute of Medicine, patient-centered care is, “Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.” There is evidence that patient-centered care improves both efficiency and patient outcomes.

The session will explore this definition of patient-centered care, raise some of the important issues around it (e.g. preference-sensitive care, continuum of care, overtreatment, personalized health), and ask whether medical schools and residency programs are fit to address these challenges. Potential curricular innovations, designed to improve patient-centered care, will be described and discussed.

Given its central role in both education and regulation, it is important that assessment be used to encourage, rather than stifle, the innovations required to support a patient-centered approach to healthcare. The session will also explore ways of enabling and sustaining change by assessing different competencies, ensuring the initial quality of providers, enhancing learning through formative assessment, and improving practice by embedding assessment in it.