Australian Medical Assessment Collaboration (AMAC)

Background

The initiation of the Australian Government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) which has a broad remit to monitor educational outcomes plays a key role in the context of the AMAC project and the important tools and approaches it offers medical schools in providing evidence of learning outcomes. Key to this role is that the evidence medical schools can use through AMAC is developed, discussed and disseminated by the schools themselves, rather than being imposed on them.

In the current environment, this is of extreme importance. For medical schools, some additional pressure is felt as a result of the Australian Medical Education Study, completed in 2008 that found some students graduate with “deficiencies in a number of clinical and procedural skills” as well as “inadequate knowledge of many of the basic medical science foundations” (DEEWR, 2008:14). It is important to establish standards and practice at a national level so as to strengthen medical programs and medical graduates, maintain quality across all the country and ensure that the unpalatable findings of the Australian Medical Education Study are rendered obsolete.

Significant achievements of the initial AMAC project give the team confidence and impetus to continue development and ensure future sustainability of the collaboration. To date, the AMAC project has confirmed that there is general acceptance and recognition of need within the medical community for projects aimed at increasing assessment quality, providing comparisons of outcomes and facilitating collaborative approaches to fulfil these aims. The existence of a range of complementary projects and stakeholders who share common ground with this project is further evidence of this acceptance.

Complementary projects include the Australian Medical Schools Assessment Collaboration (AMSAC), which involves a group of medical schools using shared assessment materials form embedding in examinations around the mid-point of the medical degree; the Australian Collaboration for Clinical Assessment in Medicine (ACCLAiM) project which benchmarks clinical graduate outcomes across four medical courses; and International Database for Enhanced Assessments and Learning (IDEAL), a shared medical assessment databank of which a number of Australian medical schools are members.

AMAC also has a strong emphasis on engaging institutions and helping to foster conversations about overall assessment quality and quality assurance of graduates. This has been demonstrated in the initial AMAC project through engagement forums, clinician workshops and piloting of assessments. The future aims for AMAC are to foster the extensive expertise in the area of medical education and assessment in a larger collaboration in order to increase recognition of the importance of assessment quality and equip medical schools with processes to monitor the quality of their student’s learning outcomes.

In addition, the need to ensure that Australian education is highly regarded and internationally recognised is important so as not to lose relevance for students or employers. The intention of AMAC is to emphasise strong collaboration based on improving education quality and learning outcomes. If this is achieved, Australian medical education will not only be able to survive in an increasingly competitive global environment, but it should also be able to stand tall as an exemplar of systemic quality.