News
As the assessment landscape in medical education evolves, the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) is expanding its workplace-based assessment (WBA) offerings to provide more options for evaluating a physician’s readiness for practice.
WBA is an approach used to assess physicians in authentic clinical settings while they provide care for patients. Unlike traditional high-stakes examinations, which measure knowledge and skills at a single point in time, WBA allows trained assessors, who are experienced physicians themselves, to directly observe a candidate’s performance over an extended period and across multiple patient encounters. This provides a richer understanding of how candidates manage important aspects of medical practice, from patient care and communicating, to demonstrating professionalism and making clinical decisions, among other skills.
“Not everything can be assessed easily with exams,” explains Dr. Jason R. Frank, the MCC’s director of Competency-Based Assessment (CBA). “A physician’s bedside manner, and their ability to communicate with and care for patients, is simply better suited to being observed, over time, while they are working.”
Under Dr. Frank’s leadership, the MCC has trained more than 140 assessors in family medicine and other specialties at sessions across the country since January 2025, including at a recent session in New Brunswick. These assessors are also trained to use the MCC’s standardized tools to track the performance of the physicians they are observing. The result is a rich data set about a physician candidate which can be used by provinces and regulators to make fair, defensible, and consistent decisions when licensing internationally trained physicians (ITPs) for practice in Canada.
“I always say that we want to be using the right tool at the right time,” explains Dr. Maxim Morin, executive director, Assessment, at the MCC. “WBA complements traditional high-stakes exams, and while these are still important when it comes to evaluating physician candidates, assessing clinical experience in the workplace can provide a richer understanding of skills beyond theoretical knowledge.”
WBA also provides candidates with important feedback over the course of the assessment, which they can integrate into their practice over time. Assessors, too, benefit from more structured support in their work, with 96 % of those trained by the MCC saying that they feel their assessment skills have significantly improved.
New WBA models play an important role in Practice-Ready Assessment (PRA) programs, which provide a pathway to licensure for ITPs —physicians who have completed postgraduate medical training and practised independently outside of Canada. Currently operating in nine provinces, PRA programs are clinical workplace-based assessment programs that typically last 12 weeks. In some of these programs, MCC’s WBA tools and approach, which include assessor training, standardized assessment frameworks, and supporting technologies, helps support standardized and defensible decisions about physicians’ readiness for independent practice.
“We are excited about the future of WBA in Canada,” says Dr. Frank. “As our country faces an ongoing health human resources crisis, we feel optimistic that our approach to WBA will enable us to welcome more ITPs to practice in Canada, knowing they have the skills they need to deliver safe, reliable care to patients.”