Conference Theme: Future of Healthcare Education

During a time of great change for global healthcare systems the future education of healthcare professionals is key to ensuring long term sustainability for populations. International institutions have called for policies that allow for the education of flexible health professionals capable of dealing with the ever-changing healthcare environment. A multi-stakeholder and interprofessional approach to tackling this issue is paramount to ensuring this takes place. Educators must ensure that they employ the most effective teaching methods, researchers must identify the right skill combinations for future professionals, and policy makers must make effective changes to national and international planning and legislation.

The health workforce faces several complex challenges at local, national and global levels. At the global level, a key challenge is the increasing number of mobile healthcare workers who are challenging country-based health workforce education and planning. At a national scale, research projects have identified that education and training must adapt to the skill requirements needed to keep the health workforce compatible with policy plans. Therefore, at a local level, educators must assess their curricula, the approaches they take to teaching and the assessment methods that they implement. The health workforce education community is already attempting to address some of these challenges, for example by moving towards interprofessional teaching, competency-based training programmes, and clinical reasoning education techniques, but there is still much work to be done.