Incoming Presidential Address
| When Bryan Luce asked if I would consider being a candidate for President of ISPOR last year, it did not take more than a moment to decide. I would not have saddled myself with a title like "Professor in Pharmacoeonomics" unless I had more than a passing interest in the subject. ISPOR is a very successful organization run by an incredibly efficient executive director and staff, with an increasingly diverse international membership. So, with no hesitation in standing for election, but what do I do now I have got the job? |
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A colleague gave me a quote that is
attributed to Petronius Arbitor, the Roman Governor of Bithynia in the first
Century AD
"We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up
teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to
meet any new situation by reorganizing and a wonderful method it can be for
creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency
and demoralization."
Poor Petronius committed suicide in AD 65. He would not have lasted long in
contemporary academia, healthcare or industry either if he had a low
threshold for reorganization. Nowadays most people survive long enough to
see their organization go through enough changes to end up exactly the way
it was the day that they joined. Consequently, the first decision of your
incoming President of ISPOR is "don’t re-organize".
At ISPOR’s excellent website (www.ispor.org),
you can find a clear diagram setting out the structure of ISPOR’s committees
and taskforces. There is a very active Student Network and Student Council
with an ever-increasing number of Student Chapters in the USA plus recently
established Chapters in Canada and the UK. These students are ISPOR’s
future. They have made a clear commitment to pharmacoeconomics and outcomes
research at an early stage in their careers. They are already devoting time
and energy to ISPOR because ISPOR is already doing a lot to encourage
student members. The membership fee for students is about to be reduced,
their registration fees for conferences are enticingly low and they are
actively encouraged to present their work at meetings. They are members of
an organization that has a clear vision to ensure that cutting edge
methodology improves decision-making in the real world. ISPOR is achieving
its vision through an increasingly successful
journal (Value in Health), a Health Sciences Committee, and a recently
established Strategic Outreach Committee.
Nonetheless, the students have understandable concerns about their careers
despite the fact that people like me are always telling them that there is a
world shortage of well-qualified researchers. Easy for me to say, what
exactly do I mean by "well-qualified"? The answer to the question is to
define the outcomes of education and training. As an organization committed
to outcomes research, ISPOR should be equally committed to outcomes based
education. Outcome based education is neither a new concept nor a passing
phase in educational technology. This approach stems from the education for
capability movement, which recognised that the aim of education should be to
equip people with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they will
require to fulfill their roles in society. Implicit in the concept of
outcome based education is the importance of life long learning. This
requires the student to develop skills in self-education and the motivation
to apply these skills after qualification. Outcome based education defines
what the learner is accountable for. It is not about telling teachers how to
teach or learners how to learn. Learning outcomes determine what is taught
and what is assessed. They can help to identify what is and is not
essential, and hence to define the core curriculum for education.
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Figure 1: ISPOR Committees and Learning Outcomes Task Force Synergy. (Chairs: Karen Rascati, RPh, PhD, ISPOR Education Committee, University of Texas, TX, USA: John Hutton, BSc, Bphil, ISPOR Health Science Committee, MEDTAP International, London, UK; Michael Drummond, PhD, ISPOR Strategic Outreach Committee, University of York, York, UK; Lieven Annemans, MSc, PhD, Mman, ISPOR Learning Outcomes TaskForce, University of Ghent, Meise, Belgium.) |
Defining the outcomes of learning does not place any constraints on the
methods used for teaching, learning, assessment, or curriculum planning.
Nonetheless, using learning outcomes does result in greater clarity in
curriculum design and makes it much easier for students to know what to
learn and what opportunities they have to help them achieve their
objectives. Similarly this process provides teachers with a clear set of
goals and helps them to develop learning opportunities for their students.
An outcome-based approach is increasingly being adopted by agencies charged
with assessment of medical curricula. In the United States the AAMC
(Association of American Medical Colleges) is responsible for undergraduate
education. The AAMC has a database for each medical school that includes the
medical school’s definition of their learning outcomes. The American Council
for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has defined six outcomes of
postgraduate medical education for residency programs. These are a
description of the competencies that will be expected of a new practitioner.
ISPOR has already taken a major step towards defining learning outcomes by
establishing a Health Sciences Committee. They set up six task forces to
address good research practice, ethics and use of pharmacoeconomics
information by healthcare decision makers. I have asked Lieven Annemens to
establish a Learning Outcomes Task Force, under the umbrella of ISPOR’s
Education Committee but with a clear remit to work with the Health Sciences
and the Strategic Outreach Committees (Figure 1). The first objectives of
this Task Force will be to define learning outcomes for pharmacoeconomics
and outcomes research and to work with the Health Sciences Task Forces to
develop case studies for learning and teaching these outcomes. This will
have to be a very interactive process and I would like to finish by asking
for your help. Please be ready to comment on early outputs from the Learning
Outcomes Task Force as they become available on the ISPOR website.
