Design and delivery
The 3‑year competency-based medical master’s program of VU University Medical Center hosts 360 students per year and was revised in 2015, allowing new educational elements such as symposia to be implemented. The goal of the symposia is to provide knowledge and training of skills in a number of topics, thereby providing a positive contribution in students’ competencies and personal development. In each of the three years of the medical master’s program, four symposia are organized. Students are required to attend at least two symposia every year. Each symposium contains two themes in a morning and an afternoon program, resulting in a total of 24 different programs per year.
Each symposium is structured around medical and societal themes addressing the various competencies. The majority of these themes are prescheduled in a calendar. Nonetheless, the content is modified each year based on evaluation outcomes and adjusted in response to new developments in healthcare. Examples of recurring themes are ‘Ethics’, ‘Patient safety: Team resource management’, ‘e-Health: Being a physician in times of social media and Google-patients’ and ‘Personal and medical leadership’, offering hands-on workshops such as ‘Balancing work and life’ and ‘Professional negotiation’. Additional items focus on current hot topics in national and international news, allowing the curriculum to be as up to date as possible. For example, in spring 2016, healthcare in relation to refugees in Europe was addressed in both a biomedical context and in terms of intercultural competencies. In addition, themes are tuned in with the stage of the master’s program. Accordingly, a ‘job interview training’ takes place in the third and final master’s year.
During the symposia, various activating and interactive teaching methods are used such as lectures, documentaries, workshops, simulation games and theatre. In training for patient safety, serious gaming is used as evidence suggests that this type of simulation can successfully promote the competencies of medical expert, communicator and collaborator [7].
Another teaching method is moral case deliberation, in which ethical dilemmas are addressed. In these sessions healthcare professionals, in this case students, present the moral questions that emerge in their clerkships during a structured dialogue. An ethicist facilitates the learning process by using various conversation methods to stimulate awareness and development of moral competencies [8].
Evaluation
After each daypart program students were asked to complete a questionnaire. We collected the data for all organized symposia in 2016. For each daypart program, a total of 8 predefined statements (as shown in Tab. 1) were combined with content-specific statements concerning the educational value and quality of each specific program. Students were asked to indicate to which degree they ‘agreed’ or ‘disagreed’ with the statements on a 5-point Likert scale. The least favourable option (− − = strongly disagree/very bad) was assigned with a score of 1, the most favourable option (++ = strongly agree/very good) with a score of 5. Based on these scores, a mean score was calculated for each statement. The mean scores were interpreted as follows: scores lower than 3.5 corresponded with a predominantly unfavourable outcome and scores higher than 3.5 with a predominantly favourable outcome. Furthermore, the questionnaire asked students to comment on the best aspects of the symposium and areas for improvement.
Table 1 Evaluation of symposia: Mean ratings (SD) for first, second and third master’s year and total
All student data were anonymous. Only pre-existing data, gathered for quality management procedures, were used. Therefore, student consent for use of the data was not required. The ethical review board of the Netherlands Association for Medical Education concluded that no further ethical review was necessary and approval was given to conduct the study (NVMO-ERB, file number 942).