Evaluating educational interventions

Abstract

Recent extensive changes have taken place in medical education at all levels in both the United Kingdom and the United States. These changes need to be assessed to measure how well reforms have achieved their intended outcomes. Educational innovation can be complex and extensive, and its measurement and description is made more difficult by the confounding and complicating effects of each later stage in the continuous curriculum. The radical curriculum reform at undergraduate level in the United Kingdom, managed care in the United States, and the increasing use of community sites for learning in both countries may greatly affect how medicine is practised and managed in the next century.1 We should know more about the educational processes and outcomes that result from the new courses and programmes being developed in medical schools and postgraduate training.