The practices for educating and training health care professionals employed over the past 100 years are no longer adequate. Health professions are rapidly changing in response to advances in technology, modern approaches to information collection and processing, financial pressures, and shifts in political climates. These and other changes challenge health care providers to remain agile and modify their clinical practices to provide exceptional patient care, and also serve to drive and empower educators to evolve in their approaches to training these providers. Therefore, educators will not only need to prepare students to practice in the current health care environment, but also requires that they provide a foundation for practice in the rapidly evolving health care environment of the future.

While research conducted to gather thoughts, attitudes, and impressions from students about their education and training is useful, hearing their voices first-hand is essential to understand their needs when considering directions of curricular change. This focus session, “Student Voices”, brings together six students from around the world and from diverse health care professions education programs to share their unique views on the future of health science education. Some of the topics to be discussed include: technology in the classroom, data and analytics, community health disparities, and teaching methods at the bedside and classroom.

The goal of this session is for faculty, staff, and administrators to understand how our students envision the future of patient care and to engage them in thinking about ideas to adequately prepare students for the health care environments of the future. This goal aligns with the conference theme: Envisioning the Future of Health Sciences Education. Furthermore, we want this discussion to embolden health science educators to think about novel interventions, methodologies, pedagogies, tools, and paradigms that may need to be embraced or developed to ensure that our students are competent to continue providing the highest quality of care to their future patients.