The 2021 IAMSE meeting offers many opportunities for faculty development and networking and brings medical sciences and medical education across the continuum together. This year’s main topic is Global Perspectives on Health Sciences Education. The first of our keynote speakers is David Gordon from the World Federation of Medical Education (WFME), United Kingdom.
Making the Global Perspective Local: Why it is essential to work for local needs and in the local context
Presenter: David Gordon – World Federation of Medical Education (WFME)
Plenary Address: Monday, June 14, 2021, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
In a time of global turbulence, it is easy to lose sight of the primary objective of medical education: to produce doctors who are best equipped to serve their patients. This talk, therefore, turns away from the pestilence that has afflicted us since early 2020 and concentrates on the need to make all aspects of medical education sensitive to need and to local context.
The latest edition of the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) global standards for basic medical education (2020) emphasises this contextual point. There is not an imperative that “you must make a curriculum according to these rules” but the question is “you need a curriculum: how are you going to build it: how will you make sure it is right for the needs of your school: how will you test it?”.
There is no paradox in the WFME standards being “global” but their application being local. We must educate all our students to a common high standard, but the actual knowledge and competences they will need at qualification must be determined by local need. The same local context must be considered in every aspect of education: teaching methods; the structure of distributed learning; the processes of graduate (specialist) education; and so on.
For more information on Dr. Gordon and to register for the 25th Annual IAMSE Meeting, please visit www.IAMSEconference.org.