Dr John Patterson
Honorary Senior Lecturer
Email: j.a.patterson@qmul.ac.uk
Location: Room 2.10, The Garrod Building
Address: Centre for Medical Education
The Garrod Building
Turner Street
Whitechapel
London E1 2AD
Until retiring from full-time employment in September 2009, John Patterson was Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Studies and Head of MBBS Assessment at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. John was appointed Associate Dean in 2002 and took on the additional responsibility of oversight of all MBBS examinations in 2007. Since he retired he has been an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Medical Education
Originally trained as a zoologist and comparative neurobiologist, John was appointed as Lecturer in Zoology at Bart’s in 1978, becoming a Lecturer in Physiology in the 1980s. He has always had a strong interest in classroom teaching and has three times been voted best preclinical teacher. He became interested in medical education in the late 1980s, initially as a Module Convenor and Phase 1 Examinations’ Secretary and then as Chair of Phase 1 MBBS and Phase 1 BDS Committees before becoming Head of Undergraduate Medical Studies in 1998. In this role he was responsible for the implementation of the 1999 MBBS curriculum - with its emphasis on problem-based learning - and its degree regulations. In 1992 he was awarded a Drapers’ Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for curriculum development work. As Head of Assessment he had oversight of all MBBS degree regulations and examinations, assessment strategy and examination statistics. At the University of London level, John has chaired the University of London Extended Matching Question Bank and served on the Medical Studies’ Committee.
In retirement, John continues to give invited talks and to run workshops on assessment; to teach on medical education and assessment on BSc and MSc courses, and to act as an external examiner and assessment consultant to various organisations. He is a regular contributor to the annual conference of the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) and has a research interest in good assessment design, assessment reliability indices and standard setting techniques. Most recently he helped introduce progress testing into to the MBBS at Barts and the London, working in collaboration with the US National Board of Medical Examiners.
Research interests:
Undergraduate medical assessment design. Reliability of undergraduate medical assesments. Standard setting in medical assessments