Designing an assessment tool for professional attributes of medical graduates from a new medical school in Nepal

Introduction: Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS) is a new medical school that specialises in specifically training doctors for service in the rural areas of Nepal. The trainee doctors’ values are consistent with sustainable improvements in the health of poor and marginalized people. This new faculty is engaged in a collaborative exercise to define professional attributes that are required of new graduates and to design a simple assessment tool to measure themselves.

 

Background: Professionalism is an increasingly important topic in medical education today and a number of studies have described ways of defining and measuring professional attributes in Western medical graduates. No such studies can be found in any Asian medical schools.

 

Methods: An initial faculty-wide consultation meeting in 2007 produced a list of 29 attributes for PAHS graduates. In 2008, the newly formed Medical Education Unit was given the task of refining them into a workable list that could be realistically assessed. This produced a list of 12 attributes together with their operational definitions.

 

Results: The definitions of required attributes together with the presence or absence of their corresponding behaviour would be indicated in a simple table that could be used in a wide variety of educational settings.

 

Discussion: The final assessment document requires only a ‘meets expectations’ or ‘below expectations’ tick from the tutor across 11 attributes. The efficacy and practical value of this tool will only be determined with use, and further research to determine how effective it is.