Best Practices in Peer Assessment: Training Tomorrow’s Physicians to Obtain and Provide Quality Feedback [Response to Letter]

Dear editor

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the letter from I. Hussain, M. Ameen, and H. Singh entitled “Final year medical students’ perspective on the use of peer assessments in the training of future doctors to obtain and provide quality feedback”. We sincerely thank the authors for their feedback on our article “Best Practices in Peer Assessment: Training Tomorrow’s Physicians to Obtain and Provide Quality Feedback”¹. The feedback is especially helpful coming from students in their last year of medical training.

We agree with the students that many of the suggestions and tips offered in our paper are difficult to implement and require dedication on the part of students, faculty, and medical school administration alike. However, we feel that it is important that students take the time to learn these skills and that this learning should be a part of the regular curriculum, even with the realization that medical curricula are indeed time-constrained. While we acknowledge that it is not easy, our hope is that students who are in a medical school program are professional and will take accountability for their own actions, including their own learning. Peer assessment is an important learning experience, and while faculty can help guide/teach - just like anything, in the end for it to be truly effective and meaningful, it is up to the students to make the most out of their experience and make an honest effort. This includes being honest with their peers since they will all be transferring these important skills to their careers as future medical professionals.

We agree that education and reinforcement of peer feedback in the curriculum should not come at the expense of clinical education, and that student perspectives should indeed be actively sought out during the planning process. Lastly, these are not “one size fits all” suggestions. All medical school curricula are slightly different and offer different advantages to different student educational goals, however the inclusion of peer feedback into the curriculum during various points in a student’s medical education will be beneficial and better prepare students for when they enter their careers in interdisciplinary patient care. We again thank the medical students for their valuable feedback and wish them nothing but the best in their medical professions.