Working Party on Education New Year Update

From Prof Val Wass, Chair WONCA  Working Party on Education.

As the New Year opens the Working Party now has 110 members from 49 countries. A few of us are now active in facilitating together at conferences. It is great fun and an excellent learning experience. Would be fantastic if more people would come forward to join us.

WONCA Asia Pacific conference success.

We held four successful collaborative workshops at the Asia Pacific Conference in Pattaya, Thailand:

Photo: Val Wass with new young Japanese recruit Daisukie Kato who joined us in Pattaya 

1: Understanding assessment methodology and the move to more personalised formative feedback:
with Hashmet Parveen, Nobutaro Ban. Debate revealed little enthusiasm for work place based assessment. Internationally it is proving difficult to implement due to the time, lack of resources and limited trainer enthusiasm etc.!

2: Developing the undergraduate curriculum to promote Family Medicine in medical schools:
with Hashmet Parveen, Nobutaro Ban; Eva Irene Maglonzo; Chandra Nadarajan. The working groups produced some excellent thoughts on the challenges and ways forward and confirmed the need for our group to develop standards for UG teaching.

3: Role modelling: a tool to promote family medicine in medical schools at the invitation of the WONCA Working Party for Women and Family Medicine:
with WWPE members Zorayda Leopando and Leilanie Nicodemus. Wide ranging discussion confirmed how influential role modelling is if we are to recruit and retain doctors in FM.

4: Continuing professional development (CPD) standards:
meeting the needs of primary care practitioners worldwide Victor Ng and Val Wass highlighted the challenges of delivering CPD and the need for WONCA to move forward looking for ways to support using the standards.

Meeting the WONCA Executive:

While in Thailand I was invited to update the WONCA Exec on our working party. Discussion centred on three priorities: (i) developing WONCA standards for FM in Undergraduate training (ii) continuing to collaborate across networks (iii) the potential to have a preconference workshop in Seoul for a day to develop UG standards. 

2018:

WWPE workshops with collaboration across networks are submitted for WONCA Rural in Delhi, WONCA Europe in Krakow. We are working on holding a preconference session in Seoul to develop WONCA standards for FM in medical schools.

If you have an interest in undergraduate education and influencing the medical school curriculum, please let me know at [email protected]