Medical Education

Medical Education is a continuous stepwise process including selection, undergraduate medical education, internship, full registration and continuous Professional Development. It is important to getting each of these steps right, since the quality of medical doctors is one of the most important determinants of quality of health system of the country. It is a right of the patient to obtain treatment from qualified medical staff. Thus, safeguarding quality of medical education has a direct impact on the rights of the patients. Registration to Practice Medical doctors must register with the Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC) in order to practice Medicine in Sri Lanka. The doctors registered with SLMC can either be graduates from Sri Lankan state medical schools or overseas medical schools. Registration to practice has two steps, provisional registration and full registration. Overseas medical graduates must pass a licensing examination (Examination for Registration to Pract...

Medical education is a continuous stepwise process that includes preclinical training, clinical training and assessments. Assessment too can be considered as a system including selection, continuous assessment, qualifying examinations and licensing exams.   Purpose and focus differ in each assessment. At each step, different competencies are assessed and certified. Therefore each step of the process of medical education becomes pre-requisite for the next step. All these components have to be considered together when certifying a fully qualified medical graduate. Further, it is not possible for one examination to assess all the competencies expected from a medical graduate. Each steps assumes that previous steps of the process have been successfully completed.   Therefore the performance in any one of the components (e.g. licensing examination) cannot compensate the inadequacies of other components in training and assessment. This calls for a foolproof syste...