More than 1,000 participants met in Melbourne, Australia, from 24-28 February 2024 for the 21st Ottawa Conference on the Assessment of Competence in the Health Professions.
Teachers, students and international experts on assessment shared their insights and experiences with regard to the assessment of competence in the health professions. Good ideas and approaches to assessment which had proved to be successful and were discussed included: competency-based assessment, feedback to students, standard setting and the OSCE. Significant new approaches described which merit further attention were the use of AI and ChatGPT as described by Iain Martin in the opening keynote session, the role of students as partners, EPAs, and programmatic assessment.
A healthy feature of Ottawa Conferences has been a debate on more controversial issues in medical education. Approaches to assessment discussed in Melbourne included open book exams, admission tests, interprofessional assessments and remote assessment. Some less comfortable issues were discussed at the Conference. Sensitive topics included the continuing need to move away from an emphasis of knowledge and skills to the assessment of empathy and attitudes, assessment and the diversity of the student body, differential attainment, examiner differences.
As Kevin Eva addressed in his closing plenary, “areas we don’t seem able to get right”.
Recordings of the keynote presentations have just been uploaded to the Ottawa 2024 website https://ottawa2024.au/keynote-speakers/
Assessment Profile
Featured at the Conference were the trends and developments in assessment which confront the different stakeholders. Pat Lilley and I argued that a medical school should agree where it stands on its PROFILE with regard to:
· Programmatic assessment
· Real world or authentic assessment
· Outcome based assessment
· Feedback and assessment for learning
· Impactful assessment
· Learner engagement in assessment, and
· Evaluation of assessment
Ian Hart Award for Innovation in Medical Education
The Ian Hart Award, named after my good friend and co-founder of the Ottawa Conferences, recognises individuals who have made an exceptional contribution to the development of health professions education nationally or internationally. A very worthy winner of the 2024 Award was Vishna Devi V Nadarajah, CEO, Provost and Professor of Medical Education at Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia. Vishna was formerlyProfessor in the School of Medicine and Pro-Vice Chancellor, Institutional Development and International at the International Medical University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I know Ian would have greatly approved of the Committee’s choice, and so do I.
Coming up
The next Ottawa Conference will be in 2026
The 22nd Ottawa Conference will be in Chicago in conjunction with AMEE and AMA in Spring 2026. I will be interested to see the continuing evolution of assessment and an update in two years’ time on the good, the new, the controversial and the uncomfortable (Hart & Harden 2000).
Reference
Hart I, Harden R (2000). The Ottawa Conferences: the good, the new, the controversial and the uncomfortable. Medical Teacher 22(4), 331-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/014215900409410
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