Health profession education scholarship: the emergence, current status and future of a discipline in its own right

Abstract

The study of medical education, as a domain of scholarly pursuit, has enjoyed a remarkably rapid development in the past 70 years and is now more commonly known as health professions education (HPE) scholarship. In this contribution, the author reviews the developments of the field from the perspective of Boyer’s four criteria that determine scholarship: discovery, integration, application and teaching. The author concludes that, given the scientific infrastructure which has emerged, HPE scholarship can arguably be considered a discipline in its own right, covering a unique niche, with inherent dependence on both medical and other health professional sciences on one hand and social sciences, including educational sciences, on the other