Medical training has become a global phenomenon, and the Physician's Charter (PC), as a missionary document, is key to training those outside the Global North. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in the medical profession are sometimes trained in contexts foreign to their social and ontological backgrounds. This might lead to confusion and…

Medical students' transition from high school to university can lead to academic and social challenges, disconnection from university life, and possible drop out. Hence, some medical education institutions use remediation programmes to address these transition challenges. This study used a social learning and integration theory to identify factors…

What knowledge matters in health professions education is an issue of debate in the literature, foregrounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by calls for students who are not only clinically competent, but also critically conscious of global health inequity. Building on this work, this paper explores what kinds of knowledge are legitimated…

Anatomical science is a fundamental element of undergraduate medical education; thus, it is imperative that the course serves future medical professionals when entering clinical practice. However, anatomical education has faced challenges in recent years including decreased allocated time, increased class sizes and over-stretched staff.…

Transformative learning theory has been recommended as a pedagogy of uncertainty for accommodating new beliefs that enable humans to thrive amid the challenges and complexity of our world. As higher education institutions embrace new roles and responsibilities, few studies have focused on how the disruptions caused by COVID-19 may facilitate…

Self-assessment involves students making judgements about their own learning. Self-assessment is promoted widely due to its benefits for lifelong learning. However, students often find self-assessment mechanical, useless and redundant -- indeed "inauthentic." This may partly result from understanding self-assessment as an instrumental…

South Africa boasts a variety of herbal medicines based on the availability of medicinal plants utilised by diverse communities for healing. This study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and attitude of Health Sciences students at a South African university, including cohorts of future doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and occupational…

In concert with global developments, South Africa has embarked on an ambitious set of health care reforms towards universal health coverage (UHC) that necessitate the transformation of health workforce education. This study explored the context, types, and utilisation of decentralised training platforms (DTPs) in undergraduate medical education at…

This systematic review reports the state-of-the-art and evidence supporting interprofessional problem-based learning (iPBL) as a developmental tool for interprofessional competences. A targeted search strategy deployed across seven electronic databases identified 32 studies which met inclusion criteria following independent double review. All…

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) has numerous benefits in medical curricula. In the extended curriculum programme (ECP) at a university in South Africa, remedial interventions, such as same year/level PAL, were implemented to improve academic success. This article focuses on the measures to ensure the quality of PAL as an intervention for the academic…

The COVID-19 pandemic and the South African government's response of a lockdown required the cessation of all clinical training. Virtual environments offered alternative methods of teaching and learning clinical skills in an attempt to mitigate the cancellation of first year students' clinical visits. The research question of how a simulated…

This article aims to explore and analyse the challenges and experiences of students in internal medicine and anaesthesiology regarding emergency remote teaching and learning during the coronavirus pandemic. South African universities have been forced to move from face-to-face to online learning (e-learning) due to the coronavirus pandemic…

Medical education in Africa is in desperate need of reforms, evident in widespread diseases, and an inability to mobilise and train the required medical workforce to deal with these health issues. However, the exponential rise in the use of mobile technologies due to the spread of the Internet and increased telecommunication networks offer an…

The highest attrition rates occur among first-year students. Universities have designed different curricular programmes, such as the development of generic skills, to address this challenge. In the medical school at the University of the Free State in South Africa, these skills were incorporated in the MBChB curriculum as an eight credit-bearing…

Sometimes universities in general are criticised because of impersonal campus environments, or "academic incivility". However, research shows that this phenomenon is more common in medical schools, pointing to increased levels of stress and incidences of attempted suicide among medical students. The decay in humanitarian attitudes and…