Ukraine’s Healthcare Ministry is to introduce U.S. tests into Ukrainian medical licensing examination. Main target is to assess where the areas for improvement are.
Ukraine’s Healthcare Ministry will check if Ukrainian medical education corresponds to international standards. Already in March medical graduates undergoing internship programs will pass tests to get licensed, some of the tests correspond to international exams. These plans were presented by Oleksandr Linchevsky, Deputy Healthcare Minister at a press-briefing at Ukraine Crisis Media Center. He said the changes to come are technical, the Ministry intends checking how topical the test content is and whether the tests correspond to modern requirements. “We will see what our education is worth, how an intern completes the tasks that somewhere across the sea are resolved by a U.S. doctor. We want to learn what the advantages, drawbacks and gaps are. We want to see the directions in which to move and plan our next steps accordingly,” he said.
There will be no consequences for students. The measures are called to study the issue as well as get the understanding of how the content of the questions corresponds to the international test. According to Lesia Voytenko, deputy director at the testing center within the Healthcare Ministry of Ukraine, subtests will be included into the medical licensing examination KROK-3 that follows graduation. The subtests are composed of the tasks that make part of the U.S. medical licensing examination. “The examination was developed by an international expert group and includes five subjects essential to each doctor irrespective of where he/she is educated,” Voytenko said.
Maryna Mruha, deputy director at the testing center within the Healthcare Ministry of Ukraine noted that the KROK licensing examination passed by the students of Ukrainian medical universities is formed by medical professionals. “The student who reads modern professional literature, who is following the news, would probably give better answers to American tests than to Ukrainian ones,” Linchevsky said.