At a recent SRH Education Forum held in Bendigo, Judi Walker and Laura Major lead a discussion on the school’s involvement with the FRAME – Medical Schools Outcomes Database (MSOD) Survey and longitudinal tracking project, as well as strategies which will be implemented to increase student survey returns.

The FRAME survey is sent to students following their longest stint in a rural clinical schools and forms part of the MSOD and Longitudinal Tracking project, the world’s first nationally coordinated project for tracking medical students through medical school and into prevocational and vocational training.

The MSOD Project is a collaboration of a number of key stakeholder organisations representing students, postgraduate education and training, rural and Indigenous health, and workforce planning.

MSOD Project objectives include:

• Provision of an effective, reliable evaluation mechanism for assessing long-term outcomes of educational programs, in particular those aimed at increasing the recruitment and retention of a rural medical workforce.
• Provision of a secure, reliable source of accurate, up-to-date data for the purposes of long-term medical workforce planning.
• Determining the effectiveness of targeted programs and interventions in influencing the career decisions of medical students.
• Promotion of strategic reform of medical education policy and programs at the university, state and Commonwealth levels in order to match program and policy frameworks with national health priorities.
• Provision of an information resource for research projects for Australian medical educators that will contribute to the national and international literature on medical education.

The school’s active involvement with the project will ensure that it continues to meet all RCTS funding parameters, in particular Parameter 8 – Maintaining and progressing an evidence base.

The administration of the student survey across the school will coincide with scheduled end of semester Year 3B and 4C feedback sessions across all four regional clinical schools, to ensure all relevant students complete the survey.  This new way of administering the survey will ensure that Monash’s 2012 survey return rate will be an improvement on previous years.

For more information on the MSOD project and some more interesting facts, have a look at p26 of the August edition of Partyline magazine, published by the National Rural Health Alliance.

You can “like” the MSOD Facebook page which will keep you up-to-date with all things MSOD. You can also visit the Medical Deans website for up-to-date information

–        By Laura Major, Manager, Rural Education Program (OHoS)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Learning and teaching, Public, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.