Investigating the support for equitable admissions policies in health professions education: the Formal Consensus method.

Higher education institutions increasingly aim to implement equity in admissions. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to determine which equitable admissions procedures are suitable in a specific context, nor which groups should be its beneficiaries. Therefore, we applied the Formal Consensus Method (FCM) to investigate the support amongst experts and stakeholders for different equitable admissions policies and target groups within the context of Health Professions Education in The Netherlands.

Computer Adaptive vs. Non-adaptive Medical Progress Testing: Feasibility, Test Performance, and Student Experiences.

Background: Computerized adaptive testing tailors test items to students' abilities by adapting difficulty level. This more efficient, and reliable assessment form may provide advantages over a conventional medical progress test (PT). Prior to our study, a direct comparison of students' performance on a computer adaptive progress test (CA-PT) and a conventional PT, which is crucial for nationwide implementation of the CA-PT, was missing.

mHealth technologies for pregnancy prevention: A challenge for patient-centred contraceptive counselling in Dutch general practice.

Background: A general practitioner (GP) standardly provides contraceptive counselling and care in the Netherlands. Recent years have seen the rise of mobile health technologies that aim to prevent pregnancy based on fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs). We lack high-quality evidence of these methods' effectiveness and clarity on how healthcare professionals include them in contraceptive counselling.

Diversity in the pathway from medical student to specialist in the Netherlands: a retrospective cohort study.

Background: Medical specialist workforces are not representative of the society they serve, partially due to loss of diversity in the path from student to specialist. We investigated which demographic characteristics of bachelor students of medicine (BSM) are associated with becoming a physician and (particular type of) medical specialist; and whether this suggests 'cloning' (reproduction of sameness) of the existing workforce.

Methods: We used a retrospective cohort design, based on Statistics Netherlands data of all first-year BSM in 2002-2004 in The Netherlands (N = 4503).