UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES  

Medical education is regulated by frameworks which medical schools must comply with to ensure consistency of experience and to quality assure the standards of medical graduates entering the workplace. This requirement introduces the need for substantial workplace-based assessment during clinical placements, requiring supervision and observation by external clinicians in a range of healthcare settings. And since medical education cohorts can be large, with students working and studying across different organisations and environments, it's clear that there are very real challenges in the delivery and management of clinical learning and assessment at scale.

In an attempt to address the challenges of how best to support authentic learning in medical education, portfolio-based learning approaches, such as those supported by PebblePad, have long been employed by medical educators as a means of blending personal development and reflective practice. This practice has evolved to include the use of structured, task-orientated portfolios that provide opportunities for students to demonstrate – and evidence - real-world learning. When you consider that successful medical graduates need to demonstrate a wide range of aptitudes, attitudes and abilities which display their capacity to make use of what they know in the real world, it’s not all that surprising that this approach is on the increase in medical schools across the globe.