The WFME Basic Medical Education Standards on the horizon 2030.
Description of WFME medical education quality improvement activities.
In 2020, WFME published an updated third edition of the Global Standards for Quality Improvement in Basic Medical Education. These are a global consensus of medical education experts on minimum requirements for best practices (core standards) and standards for quality improvement. The 2020 edition of the standards adopts a new "principles-based" approach to allow users of the standards to make their own version of the core standards, appropriate to the local context. There are many sets of standards in local use that were developed from the first and second editions of the WFME standards for basic medical education. If those local standards are still good and effective, there is no need to revise them.

The standards are not a universal core curriculum and do not define the detail of educational content. Diversity of educational programs should be encouraged, to take into account different educational, social, economic, and cultural conditions, different disease patterns, and to support social responsibility. The standards provide a template for medical schools and other medical education providers, as well as accreditation agencies, to define institutional, national and regional standards and act as a platform for quality improvement. Not all WFME standards will be relevant in all settings.
WFME recommends the use of these standards to institutions responsible for medical education:

- As a framework for curriculum development, modified or supplemented according to regional, national and institutional needs and priorities.
- To formulate individual change plans for quality improvement.
- To establish a system of evaluation, accreditation and/or recognition that guarantees minimum quality standards for programs.
- To safeguard the practice of medicine and a globally mobile medical workforce.

The standards are organized into eight universal themes: mission and values; curriculum; assessment; students; faculty; educational resources; quality assurance; and governance and administration.

Anique de Bruin is a professor in Self-Regulation in Higher Education. Her research focuses on fostering understanding of metacognitive and reasoning processes in learners of diverse ages and backgrounds, in a variety of domains (e.g., language learning, problem solving, skill development) with a specific focus on health professions education and with the aim to construct design guidelines to optimize these processes. Funded by the Dutch Science Foundation, she set up a line of research developing effective interventions to improve monitoring when learning to solve problems and when learning from texts through generating diagrams or keywords and that identified implicit indicators of students’ overconfidence when monitoring their learning. She is currently leading two collaborative research projects on effort regulation during SRL and on instructional design of nudging interventions to improve monitoring of learning. She is chair of the EARLI Emerging Field Group ‘Monitoring and Regulation of Effort’; an international network of 25 researchers developing a new research paradigm on processes related to self-regulation of effort. She is vice-director of the Graduate School of Health Professions Education at Maastricht University, a recent member of the Maastricht Young Academy, and was selected for the Karolinska Institutet KIPRIME Fellows Program.

Multiple theories of cognition inform our understanding of clinical reasoning and diagnostic error. These theories range from “micro” theories, that focus on what goes on “in the head” to “macro” theories that extend the boundaries of clinical reasoning to what goes on “out in the world.” The most well-known “micro” theory is Dual Processing Theory. Embodied cognition, ecological psychology, situated cognition and distributed cognition are a family of social cognitive theories that offer progressively more “macro” accounts of reasoning and error. Collectively, they help us understand the mind as embodied (i.e., interacting with the body), embedded (i.e. interacting with the environment) and extended (i.e., interacting with other people and artifacts in larger systems) which can have profound impacts on how we think about teaching and assessment.

Kara L. Caruthers, MSPAS, PA-C is an associate professor and associate program director at Meharry Medical College, in the PA Sciences Program, within the School of Graduate Studies and Research. She joined the faculty in the summer of 2021, having held previous teaching positions at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (2005-2007), the University of Alabama at Birmingham PA program (2010-17) and the MS (Master of Science) in Biomedical and Health Sciences program (2014-17), and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center PA program (2018-2021). Since her entry into academia in 2005, she has had the opportunity to teach both graduate and undergraduate students in several disciplines.

Her educational training includes a bachelor’s degree (Biology) in 1998 from the University of Nebraska Omaha, a master’s degree (molecular, cellular, and systemic physiology) and certificate (anatomy) from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2005 and a master’s degree (physician assistant studies) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2009. In her clinical role as a PA, she has worked in emergency medicine, urgent care, and most recently in primary care. In addition to paid clinical work, she has served as a clinician and student preceptor at a free primary care clinic and in other community health initiatives.

Her dedication to promoting medical sciences careers to students intentionally excluded from careers in medicine, those from rural communities, as well as those from educationally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds is demonstrated in her local, state, and national service. She has participated in several PA outreach events at national conferences, given a variety of presentations, and has served in leadership positions in various organizations, including the Physician Assistant Education Association, where she currently serves as Immediate Past President of the Board of Directors.