Evaluating clinical practice programs: A scoping review of evidence

Introduction
Program evaluation is mandated by the Australian Medical Council as an integral component of accreditation standards1. There is paucity of evidence-based evaluation frameworks for whole-of-program and clinical practice (CP) evaluation.

Objective
To develop a comprehensive framework to evaluate the CP program within a pre-registration medical program.

Methods
A preliminary search was conducted to retrieve literature on CP program evaluation. As there was insufficient literature, the search was broadened
to whole-of-program evaluation. A scoping review was conducted to critically analyse current pre-registration medical education program evaluation frameworks. Keywords in selected articles were used to develop a comprehensive search strategy for MEDLINE (Ovid) with librarian assistance. This search was translated for Embase and ERIC using the Polyglot Search Translator2. Snowballing was used to screen for grey literature. The inclusion criteria were articles describing utility/steps/frameworks/guidelines of medical program or specific domain evaluation or evaluation of program/domain via major stakeholder perspective; methodological studies on development, implementation, or validation of an evaluation framework and articles published
from 2000 to 2022. The exclusion criteria were abstracts; articles relevant to specialist training programs, graduate medical education and evaluating specific educational interventions. Title/abstract and full text screening were performed
using Covidence (Veritas Health Innovation, Melbourne, Australia).

Results
Out of 2261 articles, title/abstract screening was performed in 2258 following deduplication. 2160 were excluded and 98 were assessed for full text eligibility. A total of 55 studies were selected for data extraction.