Master Degree Education
Master’s Degree Education for students and residents is a challenging and labor-intensive process. Future physicians must acquire enormous amounts of information and fit it into an operational clinical reasoning framework that feeds back into sound clinical practice. The skills, methods, and attitudes by which educators of physicians will help to shape the transformation of students to physicians are not innate nor born from a direct outset.
Rising awareness of contributions of educational research and theory as valuable resources in developing and delivering effective medical training. Specialists who focus their academic work and research on issues need appropriate academic training in educational theory and practice to make significant contributions to understanding and improving what works in medical education.
There are several routes for doctors other healthcare professionals and educators who wish to deepen their understanding of educational theory and research in medical contexts. Many faculty development programs are operated by medical schools themselves. These programs extend anywhere from a single lecture to a single day, to a year or two in length, and all point to increase the academic expertise of their party.
Methods
Cusimano and David’s paper provided an initial compendium of higher chances in health
professions education. However, our inclusion and exclusion criteria differ from their original paper. Our database was limited to courses leading to an award that provided a master’s degree at
graduation, and we focused exclusively on higher training in medicine or the health professions. We excluded any courses that led only to diplomas, certificates, or attendance certificates irrespective of their length, even though many master’s courses offered accredited modules along the route to a master’s award.
In addition, we excluded programs in PhD for the above two assumptions. First, people involved in medical education have limited time to commit to additional formal training. Whether they are full-time faculty or students gain time out of residency programs, they must subtract time from other responsibilities to engage in further medical or training. Because PhD programs require several years to complete and often require a year or more of full-time commitment, such programs may exceed the time available. Second, people involved in medical or health education seek advanced training to contribute better to medical or health education practice rather than developing research-based careers in medical education.
For the most part, doctoral programs are targeted toward preparing researchers, while master’s programs focus on practitioners hence we assumed that master’s programs would be closer to current trends. Because most PhD programs require a greater time commitment, emphasize original research, and aim to prepare people for research-based careers, we ban them from our list.
To further enrich the scope of our search, we communicated directly with several organizations to ask about their knowledge of existing directories complete or otherwise including the Association of American Medical College, the Association of Faculties of Medicine in Canada, the Association for Surgical Education, Master’s Degree Education, the Association for Medical Education in Europe. Though they were we were interested in such a directory, none of these organizations were willing to share additional information with us.
As a further validation of our preliminary findings, we contacted a list of 10 top medical schools in the USA that are not included in our initial dataset. We received a reply from nine of these schools but found only one new master’s program in medical education, in medical education, at the University of Michigan. Moreover, we were able to set up direct electronic contact with all institutions where there was a report of an existing program. This further expanded our list to its current total of 21 master’s degree programs.
From this information, we generated a database containing the following 12 fields, name of institution, geographic location, academic location, and the title of the degree program were available online, on-site, or in a mix of both. In case the school was unable to provide information, it was instead obtained directly from the program. Data concerning each program was sent via email to the director to crosscheck and correct any errors that could have occurred as a result.
On another note, directors of programs were noted as to our intention of using their data in our presentation and that of other programs along with publishing our results.
Geography
First, by country, then further located by city or region within each country in the geographic location field. We found three programs in Canada, six in the United States, eight in the United Kingdom, three in Australia, and one in the Netherlands.
Academic location of the program
Most programs were located in the institution’s
faculty, school, college, medicine, medical, and health sciences. Two programs awarded their master’s degrees from the departments of education at their institutions. In the case of Canada’s Dalhousie University, the master’s degree was awarded by a neighboring institution’s Faculty of Education Mount Saint Vincent’s University.
Degree title
There was a range of nomenclature for the various programs. Most were labeled some variation of Master’s of Medical Education. A minority made explicit reference to all health professions in their title, for example, Master’s of Health Professions Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at the University of New South Wales, and Maastricht in the Netherlands. Degrees located in
schools of education were generally designated as Master’s of Education with a specialization/concentration in the health professions.
Conclusion
We discovered 21 programs currently operating that offer master’s degrees in medical education twice as many more than Cusimano and David. Identified nine programs that offered master’s degrees in medical education that met our basis for inclusion. Excluded three of their programs, two because of content and a third because of the prey audience.
Baylor College limits its program to only dentists. The University of Toronto Family and Community Medicine program places more focus on community practice rather than medical education. The University of Washington program focuses on medical informatics instead of medical education. In our current search, we could find only seven of their nine master’s level programs, thus raising a question of what happened to the remaining two, especially given the relatively small number of such initiatives worldwide. It would be gripping to track them up and ask the reason for their disappearance with the hope that anything new offered would not have discernible errors.