Need for innovations and reforms in pedagogy paradigm for transforming health professional educatio

Abstract

Health professionals are crucial elements of health systems which have a major impact on delivery of health outcomes. Efficient health professionals are a prerequisite to improve our health services. However, there has been a growing concern globally, about the mismatch of health professionals produced to the population needs and the need to bring reforms in health professional education. In the past, most attempts to revitalize health professional education have been restricted to changes in curriculum of health professional education, and the pedagogy techniques used remain more or less the same as used few decades ago. In view of the pressing need for changes in pedagogy techniques for health professional education; the present paper is an attempt to review the innovations and reforms in pedagogy in this field and suggest suitable recommendations. Currently, depending on the setting of the institutions where health professionals are trained, different pedagogical techniques are used and they can be categorized as Non IT & IT enabled techniques. Although a wide range of pedagogy techniques are available, a large component of teaching and assessment is by traditional methods and there is need to expand the scope of use of various pedagogy techniques and use appropriate mix and match of methods. To facilitate this, there needs to be systemic and strategic changes, to give opportunities to faculty to develop skills in innovative teaching and to provide learning environments conducive to transformative learning. Also, there is need to conduct research on the use and impact of effective pedagogical methods.