Workshop Facilitators: Dr Shelley Ross, Dr Brent Kvern, Dr Alison Baker, Dr Cheri Bethune, Dr Kathrine Lawrence, Dr Keith Wilson, Dr Erich Hanel, Dr Annelise Miller, Dr Theresa van der Goes and Dr Karen Schultz

Many health professions education programs globally are in the planning or implementation phase of adopting competency-based medical education (CBME). Concurrently, training programs are considering ways to improve approaches to assessment to better capture evidence about the competence of their learners. Programmatic assessment, first introduced to health professions education by van der Vleuten and Schuwirth in 2005, is an approach to assessment that shifts the focus away from summative examinations. Instead, the focus is on the longitudinal collection of multiple pieces of data about learner competence, collected through multiple different assessment tools. While many programs have embraced the idea of programmatic assessment, designing effective and trustworthy programmatic assessment is a serious challenge for many programs. How can those who plan assessment for health professions training programs ensure that they are assessing the right things, with the right tools, in the right way? Many programs have already done the work of identifying and describing the professional competencies that must be assessed during training. The next steps are to determine 1) which assessment tools are most appropriate to assess each competency, and 2) how to make sense of the assessment data that is collected. This interactive workshop will give participants the opportunity to work through the process of developing programmatic assessment, guided by a template in the form of a worksheet. Using the case example of Canadian family medicine training, participants will identify the enablers and barriers faced by accrediting bodies and individual programs in transforming assessment. We will introduce the basic principles of programmatic assessment, and give scenario prompts to facilitate frequent small group breakout discussions to consolidate the information shared and make it actionable. Using the worksheet, individuals and small groups will look at how to operationalize the didactic information about what factors to consider in designing programmatic assessment.