Health professional education institutions (“schools”) who aspire to social accountability have a mission to train a “fit-for-purpose” health workforce. This means recruiting suitable students, and then providing them with curricula, role models, and clinical placements that ensure that graduates will have the knowledge, attitudes and skills to address the priority health needs of local populations.
It is important that schools assess their success in achieving this mission, and so it helps to monitor details of student background, placement location during health professional school, practice intentions, and eventual location and discipline of practice.
Longitudinal tracking studies can be used with successive cohorts of graduates to collect the information needed to judge school success. The collected data can be used by schools to critically reflect on what works or does not work in training a fit-for-purpose health workforce for their region, and adjust selection strategies or curricula elements to continually improve the outcomes. Standardized data collection tools and methods allow comparisons of student and graduate outcome data among schools and across nations, fostering mutual learning.
The THEnet Graduate Outcome Study (GOS) is an international prospective cohort study, which in 2020 had over 6,000 learners from nine health professional schools in seven countries and five continents. Surveys are administered to learners at Entry to medical school, at Exit from medical school and at Years 1, 4, 7, and 10 after graduating from medical school. Copies of the Entry, Exit and Postgraduate Year 1 questionnaires and their respective guides are provided below. Health professional education institutions wishing to join the GOS should contact bjorg@thenetcommunity.org . Schools are welcome to adapt the tools for their use, provided that they acknowledge THEnet. Survey tools are provided as is, without any warranty or guarantee.
For more information about the GOS and associated tools, please contact karen.johnston@jcu.edu.au.
Survey tools
To obtain the available tools, below please provide your name, email and affiliation and the tool you want and you will receive an email that contains the link to download the tool you have selected.
Selected THEnet GOS publications.
Johnston K, Guingona M, Elsanousi S, Mbokazi J, Labarda C, Cristobel FL et al. (2020). Training a fit-for-purpose rural health workforce for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs): How do drivers and enablers of rural practice intention differ between learners from LMICs and high income countries? Front. Pub Health. 8:582464 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.582464
Larkins S, Johnston K, Hogenbirk JC, Willems S, Elsanousi S, Mammen M et al. (2018). Practice intentions at entry to and exit from medical schools aspiring to social accountability: findings from the Training for Health Equity Network Graduate Outcome Study. BMC Med Educ. 18:261. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-018-1360-6
Larkins S, Michielsen K, Iputo J, Elsanousi S, Mammen M, Graves L et al. (2015). Impact of selection strategies on representation of underserved populations and intention to practise: international findings. Med Educ. 49(1):60-72. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.12518
An evaluation framework for attributing and quantifying health workforce and community impacts from socially-accountable health professional education. Conference Proceedings of the Fourth Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, Nov 2017, Dublin, Ireland. Torres Woolley, Fortunato Cristobal, Carole Reeve, Jusie Lydia Siega-Sur, Simone Ross, Andre-Jacques Neusy.
Suggested acknowledgement
The questionnaire and methods were adapted from those developed for the THEnet Graduate Outcomes Study (https://thenetcommunity.org/graduatetracking).
