News

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RACGP awards largest education research grant to date

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The RACGP Education Research Grants (ERGs) Special Grant Round 2018–19 aims to continue to building research capability with a specific focus on workplace-based assessment (WBA). The college offered one grant to a regional training organisation (RTO)-led consortium of up to $450,000 – the largest to be awarded through the ERG program.
 
The successful RTO is South Australia’s GPEx, in partnership with the Prideaux Centre for Research in Health Professions Education at Flinders University and the Department of Educational Development and Research at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. The project will also engage several general practice training organisations across Australia.
 
Associate Professor Jill Benson is a medical educator at GPEx and lead of the ERG project, ‘The development of an evidence-based, practical and contextualised workplace-based assessment (WBA) framework for general practice training and education’.
 
Associate Professor Benson told newsGP the GPEx-led project seeks to identify and catalogue means of measuring and predicting progress through WBAs, with the aim of leading to the success of participants in general practice training programs.
 
This will be done through:

• reviewing the literature on WBAs
• auditing the WBA tools, users and contexts currently present in Australian RTOs and the Rural Vocational Training Scheme and mapping these against the core skills of the RACGP Curriculum for Australian General Practice
• completing a series of mixed-methods investigations on the acceptability, user experience and effectiveness of WBA approaches.

Associate Professor Benson believes the project will contribute to benefiting the future of general practice through collaboration with various organisations to gather informed research.
 
‘The project will offer an Australian wide general practice training perspective which will ensure the resulting WBA framework will be relevant across the Australian landscape,’ she said.
 
‘To our knowledge, this is the first Australian project of its kind that will draw on previous international and Australian-based research and expertise to develop a WBA framework, which considers the nexus between the tool, the user and the context.
 
‘The literature indicates that to ensure successful WBA, each of these three elements needs to be considered.’
 
With the project informed by leading experts in medical education and WBA, Associate Professor Benson is confident this will enable the most up-to-date evidence and thinking in the sphere of WBAs to be integrated into the framework design.
 
‘The WBA framework developed will provide a blueprint for the future delivery of WBA assessment within Australian general practice,’ she said.
 
The Special Grant Round project runs from 1 November 2018 – 31 May 2019.
 
This research project is supported by the RACGP with funding from the Australian Government under the Australian General Practice Training program.

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Education Research Grant general practice training GPEx

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