TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping health, social and health system issues and applying a social accountability inventory to a problem based learning medical curriculum
AU - Kelly, Dervla
AU - Hyde, Sarah
AU - Abdalla, Mohamed Elhassan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Social accountability is a powerful concept. It is applied to medical education to encourage future doctors to take action to address health inequalities and overlooked health needs of disadvantaged populations. Problem-based learning (PBL) provides an ideal setting to teach medical students about these topics. The objective of this study is to explore how well the components of social accountability are covered in a pre-clinical PBL medical curriculum and to determine the usefulness of an adapted validated social accountability framework. We identified Irish health needs and social issues through a literature review. The retrieved documents were aligned to four values (relevance, equity, cost-effectiveness and quality) from a validated social accountability inventory, to generate a map of social accountability values present in the Irish health system and population. We then used the adapted validated social accountability inventory to evaluate the content of the PBL medical curriculum at an Irish medical school. We identified 45 documents, which upon analysis lead to the identification of health and social issues related to social accountability. 66 pre-clinical PBL cases included demographic, health and psychosocial issues similar to the local population. Analysing along the four social accountability values, the PBL cases demonstrated room for improvement in the equity and relevance domains. Topics for expansion are Traveller health, LGBTI health, alcohol use, climate change and more. Medical educators can use the paper as an example of how to apply this methodology to evaluate PBL cases. Adapting and applying a validated framework is a useful pedagogical exercise to understand established societal values related to social accountability to inform a medical curriculum. We identified opportunities to improve the PBL cases to depict emerging global and social issues.
AB - Social accountability is a powerful concept. It is applied to medical education to encourage future doctors to take action to address health inequalities and overlooked health needs of disadvantaged populations. Problem-based learning (PBL) provides an ideal setting to teach medical students about these topics. The objective of this study is to explore how well the components of social accountability are covered in a pre-clinical PBL medical curriculum and to determine the usefulness of an adapted validated social accountability framework. We identified Irish health needs and social issues through a literature review. The retrieved documents were aligned to four values (relevance, equity, cost-effectiveness and quality) from a validated social accountability inventory, to generate a map of social accountability values present in the Irish health system and population. We then used the adapted validated social accountability inventory to evaluate the content of the PBL medical curriculum at an Irish medical school. We identified 45 documents, which upon analysis lead to the identification of health and social issues related to social accountability. 66 pre-clinical PBL cases included demographic, health and psychosocial issues similar to the local population. Analysing along the four social accountability values, the PBL cases demonstrated room for improvement in the equity and relevance domains. Topics for expansion are Traveller health, LGBTI health, alcohol use, climate change and more. Medical educators can use the paper as an example of how to apply this methodology to evaluate PBL cases. Adapting and applying a validated framework is a useful pedagogical exercise to understand established societal values related to social accountability to inform a medical curriculum. We identified opportunities to improve the PBL cases to depict emerging global and social issues.
KW - content analysis
KW - curriculum mapping
KW - medical education
KW - problem-based learning
KW - Social accountability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85121854056&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10872981.2021.2016243
DO - 10.1080/10872981.2021.2016243
M3 - Article
C2 - 34958286
AN - SCOPUS:85121854056
SN - 1087-2981
VL - 27
SP - 2016243
JO - Medical Education Online
JF - Medical Education Online
IS - 1
M1 - 2016243
ER -