University of Health Sciences: New learning approaches stressed for medical students

British prof delivers lecture on ‘changing face of medicine’.

LAHORE:

Medical education should be oriented towards health and community as opposed to disease and hospital, according to noted British physician and medical educationist Prof Parveen Kumar.

In a lecture on ‘The changing face of medicine’ at the University of Health Sciences (UHS) on Tuesday, Prof Kumar said that medical education needed to be adjusted to the changing conditions in healthcare delivery systems. Schools needed to produce doctors who could cope with the exponential growth of medical and scientific knowledge, learn throughout their careers and fulfil the expectations of society.

She said that there had been a paradigm shift in medical education to learner-centred approaches, one major change being the development of problem-based learning and the move towards competency-based and outcome-based learning. “These new approaches have sought to place students as the focus of learning, with their teachers in supporting roles,” she said.



This paradigm shift, she said, was prompted by many factors, not least the need to produce doctors capable of adapting to and meeting the changing healthcare needs of the communities they served.

Prof Kumar said that medicine was still the most trusted profession in the world. A recent survey showed that 84 per cent of people considered medicine a trustworthy profession, whereas only 22 per cent considered politicians trustworthy. “It is the job of medical teachers to make sure future doctors are prepared to deliver nothing but absolute excellence in patient care,” she said.

Prof Kumar is the author of Kumar and Clark’s Textbook of Clinical Medicine, taught in medical schools the world over. She teaches at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London.

Earlier, in his welcome address, UHS Vice Chancellor Maj Gen (retired) Prof Muhammad Aslam emphasised the need for adopting new pedagogical approaches for the education of healthcare professionals. He said that effective performance as a healthcare professional was no longer predicated on memorising a body of facts, but depended on being able to assimilate, evaluate and use new information.

The vice chancellor conferred the status of adjunct professor on Prof Kumar.

Prof Abdul Majeed Chaudhry, Prof Humayun Maqsood, Lt Gen (r) Dr Syed Afzal Ahmad, Prof Ghiasun Nabi Tayyab and Prof Zahid Bashir also attended the lecture.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 27^th, 2013.