Workshop Facilitators: Dr Nidhi Garg, Tyler Clark, Dr Lauren O’Mullane and Prof Deborah O’Mara

Programmatic Assessment (PA) is increasingly being implemented in medical and health professional programs throughout the world since first being outlined by Schuwirth and Van der Vleuten (2011). While there is widespread support for the principles of PA, studies to-date have been largely theoretical and some medical schools have implemented only some aspects of PA (Torre et al., 2020). Unintended consequences of PA can include an increase in data complexity, staff workload, resource requirements, persistent failure to fail, non-transparent decision-making and increase in student stress (Ryan et al., 2023). Sydney Medical School implemented PA in 2020 alongside a curriculum reform. While there have been benefits to implementing a PA system, challenges also arose. This necessitated adaptations to the initial vision of PA to suit our context in which allow for progression decisions to be made for multiple large cohorts at a single time point.