Editorial: The Patient/Consumer Voice in Health Professional Education

Twenty years ago, the first conference ‘Where's the patient voice in health professional education?’ was held in Vancouver, Canada. This was followed in 2015 by a second iteration that resulted in the Vancouver Statement on the patient voice [1], a document that identified nine priorities for action in the areas of policy, recognition and support, innovation, research and evaluation, and dissemination and knowledge exchange.

This year, November 2025, the third conference will consider what has been achieved in patient participation in health professional education (HPE) in the last two decades. There have been great advances in patient and public participation in health services research [2] and there is a growing literature on consumer engagement in health care delivery and its outcomes. With regard to HPE we stress that the patient voice is an active partnership in which patients are involved in one or more of education development, curriculum co-design, facilitation of learning, feedback dialogue and assessment [3].

This virtual issue of The Clinical Teacher complements the conference's theme and highlights the diversity of work being carried out globally to ensure that the patient's voice is being heard and is sparking innovation. The papers stress the active patient voice rather than activities involving patient cases or engaging with lived patient experiences where patients had no other role than providing their stories. While most papers focus on the global north, Jawwad and colleagues' qualitative study explored patient involvement in health professional education in Pakistan, emphasising the need to respect cultural contexts and diversity [4].

Co-production of curriculum and co-design of education are important and relatively new processes that feature in the articles. For example, the involvement of patients in curriculum co-production, where patients are equal partners with faculty and students, helped enrich content and provided an important patient perspective in an innovation at the University of Leicester Medical School (UK) [5]. Patients' involvement in a pharmacy-based simulation from co-design to debriefing was shown to promote inclusive communication and enhance the authenticity of scenarios [6]. Advocacy groups were recruited to co-design a perinatal bereavement programme for medical students in Ireland [7]. Brand and colleagues from Australia provide a guide to co-design of education, stressing the need for institutional and infrastructure support to ensure success and the importance of authentic perspectives [8]. These examples of patient partnership are underpinned by patient lived experience along with feedback to facilitate open dialogue between patients and professionals, both clinicians and educators. Not all professionals are skilled in eliciting and acting on such feedback, but training can help as indicated by Bosveld and colleagues [9]. In addition, patients increasingly undertake senior leadership roles such as those described by Descôteaux and colleagues [10].

There is still a lot to do to ensure that the patient voice becomes a routine, valued and institutionally supported component of HPE. Rigorous studies to determine whether and how patient participation in education has an impact on learners' subsequent interactions with patients are important to support the rationale for patient inclusion. The study by Sawatzky and Kline suggests a longer-term impact from one institution's health mentors program [11]. However, another Canadian study highlights that faculty members may still underplay the relevance of patients being involved in certain areas of education such as summative assessment and entrustable professional activities [12]. Wu and colleagues emphasise the need to ensure that patient and family involvement is ethical and inclusive, requiring understanding of, and approaches to, the knowledge that patients hold and share during education [13].

This virtual issue celebrates considerable progress since the last conference 10 years ago and identifies opportunities to expand the breadth and depth of patient partnerships in HPE. We hope it inspires educators to work more equitably with patients as partners and to develop strategies to identify and overcome barriers to further progress.

Jill Thistlethwaite: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. Angela Towle: conceptualization, writing – review and editing. Carolyn Canfield: conceptualization, writing – review and editing.