{"id":167154,"date":"2024-04-29T15:39:59","date_gmt":"2024-04-29T13:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=167154"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:27:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:27:19","slug":"starting-next-year-erasmus-mc-will-prepare-students-for-a-new-healthcare-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2024\/04\/29\/starting-next-year-erasmus-mc-will-prepare-students-for-a-new-healthcare-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting next year, Erasmus MC will prepare students for a new healthcare landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

The profession of physician is about to undergo substantial changes. The ageing population and fast arrival of smart technology requires physicians to learn different skills than they have until now. Accordingly, the degree programme in Medicine has been completely overhauled. After some seven years of preparation, the first batch of students will start in the new 2030 Erasmus Physician programme this September. They will graduate in 2030.<\/p>\n

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Maarten Frens, vice-dean of Education, suggests having our conversation in the Erasmus MC Education Centre. Around us is the murmur of students who are studying or just catching up with each other. Frens has always liked coming here, but after the attack late last September he likes it even better. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful seeing all students come together here\u201d, he says, walking past the large art canvas he officially opened last week. It covers the part of the Education Centre where the fire raged.<\/p>\n

What prompted you to change the curriculum drastically?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you ever still walk into a bank branch? You do all your banking online and digitally, don\u2019t you? At first, people found this very impersonal and it felt unsafe. Yet this is exactly what healthcare is going to be like. It\u2019s going to change enormously in the coming decades due to an ageing population, population growth, technological innovations and staff shortages. This calls for different care, different physicians and, therefore, a different programme.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe embarked on this because all of us are really convinced that the profession of physician will look completely different ten years from now. And we asked ourselves: what will it be like to be a physician then?\u201d<\/p>\n

I read in the educational vision for the new programme that in 2017 the visitation committee found the programme a bit traditional.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny; it\u2019s the first-mover disadvantage at work. We were the first programme where scientists and clinicians worked together as early as the bachelor phase. What was missing then, though, and what we\u2019re adding now, is more and better interprofessional cooperation \u2013 that is, between disciplines \u2013 and greater social responsibility among physicians. In addition, we have to pay more attention to technological developments. Since ChatGPT, this has suddenly become very obvious, but what we\u2019d already seen coming is that many technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, will have a huge effect on medicine in the coming years. The current curriculum paid far too little attention to this, but every future physician will have to be able to relate to this properly.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is the biggest change to the programme?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt starts with testing, really. We\u2019re going to implement programmatic testing. This means no longer having students run form one examination to the next, taking a hurdle each time to progress a little.
\n\u201cThe new way of testing means we define clear competencies in advance that we want students to develop sufficiently in. Students do take knowledge tests, but they can use a dashboard to keep track of their progress in each knowledge domain. At the moment, they still get a mark for their overall<\/em> knowledge, but this will become more specific. Rather than failing a test, you can see how you are doing in a given domain \u2013 think knowledge domains such as anatomy and physiology \u2013 and competencies such as cooperation and clinical reasoning. Of course, things do become very tricky when there\u2019s no progress in a particular domain for a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the way, we\u2019ll only really be able to start programmatically testing everything in a few years. The full programme will be ready then and we\u2019ll be able to see in which knowledge domains students need the most extra help. Until then, we\u2019ll keep testing knowledge in the more traditional way. In September, however, we\u2019ll already be able to start the programmatic testing of soft skills, or durable<\/em> skills, as I prefer to call them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t

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