The goal of better medical student preparation for clinical practice drives curricular initiatives worldwide. Learning theory underpins Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) as a means of safe transition to independent practice. Regulators mandate senior assistantships to improve practice readiness. It is important to know whether meaningful…

Variation in examiner stringency is a recognised problem in many standardised summative assessments of performance such as the OSCE. The stated strength of the OSCE is that such error might largely balance out over the exam as a whole. This study uses linear mixed models to estimate the impact of different factors (examiner, station, candidate and…

Medical schools worldwide undertake widening access (WA) initiatives (e.g. pipeline, outreach and academic enrichment programmes) to support pupils from high schools which do not traditionally send high numbers of applicants to medicine. UK literature indicates that pupils in these schools feel that their teachers are ill-equipped, cautious or…

Variation in examiner stringency is an ongoing problem in many performance settings such as in OSCEs, and usually is conceptualised and measured based on scores/grades examiners award. Under borderline regression, the standard within a station is set using checklist/domain scores and global grades acting in combination. This complexity requires a…

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of…

Recruitment to General Practice (GP) is currently low in many countries. Here we focus on two binary choices for junior doctors: first, whether to apply to GP; second, whether to accept a GP training place if offered. Previous attitudinal studies have indicated factors claimed to affect recruitment. The current study goes further by quantifying…

Undergraduate clinical assessors make expert, multifaceted judgements of consultation skills in concert with medical school OSCE grading rubrics. Assessors are not cognitive machines: their judgements are made in the light of prior experience and social interactions with students. It is important to understand assessors' working conceptualisations…

There is a widespread consensus about the need for accreditation systems for evaluating post-graduate medical education programs, but accreditation systems differ substantially across countries. A cross-country comparison of accreditation systems could provide valuable input into policy development processes. We reviewed the accreditation systems…

This paper is concerned with exploring the relationship between perceptions of professional identities, interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice. It seeks to introduce the concept of interprofessional responsibility as both a shift in the way in which to conceptualise the professional identity of Health and Social Care…

Emotion characterises learners' feedback experiences. While the failure-to-fail literature suggests that emotion may be important, little is known about the role of emotion for educators. Secondary analyses were therefore conducted on data exploring 110 trainers' and trainees' feedback experiences. Group and individual narrative interviews were…

Despite repeated calls for change, the problem of widening access (WA) to medicine persists globally. One factor which may be operating to maintain social exclusion is the language used in representing WA applicants and students by the gatekeepers and representatives of medical schools, Admissions Deans. We therefore examined the institutional…

Current theoretical thinking asserts that leadership should be distributed across many levels of healthcare organisations to improve the patient experience and staff morale. However, much healthcare leadership education focusses on the training and competence of individuals and little attention is paid to the interprofessional workplace and how…

Traditional methods of assessing personality traits in medical school selection have been heavily criticised. To address this at the point of selection, "non-cognitive" tests were included in the UK Clinical Aptitude Test, the most widely-used aptitude test in UK medical education (UKCAT: http://www.ukcat.ac.uk/). We examined the…

Although there is extensive evidence confirming the predictive validity of situational judgement tests (SJTs) in medical education, there remains a shortage of evidence for their predictive validity for performance of postgraduate trainees in their first role in clinical practice. Moreover, to date few researchers have empirically examined the…

The ability to innovate is an important requirement in many organisations. Despite this pressing need, few selection systems in healthcare focus on identifying the potential for creativity and innovation and so this area has been vastly under-researched. As a first step towards understanding how we might select for creativity and innovation, this…