Pathology Education: SY17-1 TEACHING AND EVALUATION OF BASIC PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCES IN A GENERATION OF PROBLEM BASED LEARNING.

The past 20 years has seen a paradigm shift in the direction of pathology teaching to medical students with the understanding that the purpose medical student education was to train the 'undifferentiated' doctor equipped with skills to progress to postgraduate training. With the move in many regions to a shorter graduate entry program and changes in teaching faculty, in many schools in the Australasian region there has been a consequent reduction time devoted to pathology teaching to students. The quality of teaching varies greatly between medical schools, and in many cases this has created a greater need for an understanding of basic pathological principles for pathology residents and trainees. The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia has since the early 1980 s conducted an examination in Basic Pathological Sciences that trainees normally sit within the first 3 years of their training to ensure that all pathology trainees are equipped with the necessary foundation knowledge of pathological processes. In the past 4 years the College has allowed medical students to sit this examination and this has allowed an assessment of to what extent students learn about pathology in their medical school training. Over the past 4 years the pass rate of candidates overall ranged from 59% to 86%, and in every year trainees performed better than medical students. In this 4 year period the main area of weakness of all candidates was in the area of clinical biochemistry, including laboratory and test evaluation. The field of genetic pathology was most variable - in 1 year this had the best overall pass rate while in the following year it had the worst pass rate. Unexpectedly there was not one single area in which medical students had deficient knowledge. This can be explained by the demographics of all candidates sitting the exam, as 31/66 (47%) had a 4 year period from the completion of their studies and sitting the exam which emphasizes the need for an examination to refresh the basic pathology knowledge acquired during their medical school training.