General practice and the Medical Licensing Assessment

[摘要] From 2024/2025, all UK medical students will sit the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA),1 a mandated national exam comprising: a written applied knowledge test (AKT) in single best answer (SBA) format; and a clinical and professional skills assessment (CPSA). Here we consider the implications for primary care, and for those involved in teaching primary care to medical undergraduates, including GPs and other primary care professionals.ASSESSMENT DRIVES LEARNING? Assessment motivates student learning.2 Students often judge the value of learning experiences by their perceived relevance to examinations, and high-stakes assessments such as the MLA are particularly potent influences.2 Undergraduate primary care has, historically, suffered in those judgements, with students perceiving that ‘exam-readiness’ is best honed in hospital placements, while primary care placements offer ‘real-world’ medicine — valuable, but not as immediately relevant.3 When assessments test, or are perceived to test, certain areas of a medical curriculum and not others, student engagement and learning are potentially unequally incentivised. Furthermore, high-stakes assessments affect how teachers implement their curriculum.4 An impetus to ‘teach the test’ is especially likely if institutional rankings are devised based on MLA results, which the General Medical Council (GMC) acknowledges as a possibility,5 albeit one they discourage. The MLA may therefore profoundly affect undergraduate medical education, and it is critical that it supports the aims and content of primary care teaching.

[学科分类] 卫生学