Research
My doctoral research addresses a structural gap in Caribbean medical education. Since 2024, CAAM-HP’s revised accreditation standards have created real, dated pressure on the region’s medical schools to build OSCE-based assessment, culturally adapted curricula, faculty development, and competency-based education infrastructure — using models built for large, well-resourced schools elsewhere, which don’t transfer cleanly to small, resource-constrained settings. This page tracks the four linked studies making up that research program as they move from framework to publication.
My current research centers on competency-based medical education in the Caribbean — OSCE design, EPA implementation, and faculty development under real resource constraints.
Assessment
Designing valid and reliable OSCEs for small-cohort Caribbean medical schools: a resource-constrained, cost-aware framework.
Research question: Can OSCE assessment stay valid, reliable, and defensible for small-cohort Caribbean medical schools that lack the institutional capacity most OSCE literature assumes?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD
Curriculum
Beyond Calgary-Cambridge: designing a clinical communication curriculum for the Caribbean clinical encounter.
Research question: Do imported communication frameworks like Calgary-Cambridge hold up against the structural realities of the Caribbean clinical encounter — Creole/Kriol language variation, syncretic health beliefs, collective family decision-making, and a disease burden rarely covered in standard training materials?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD
Faculty development
Teaching the teachers: a model for faculty development in small-cohort Caribbean medical schools.
Research question: Do mentorship-based, peer-led faculty-development models — already documented in similarly small, resource-constrained settings like the Pacific Islands — transfer to small Caribbean medical schools?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD
Competency infrastructure
Implementing entrustable professional activities in small Caribbean medical schools: a proposed minimum-viable framework
Research question: Building on the region’s one existing CBME case report (Busari & Duits, 2015, Curaçao), can a simplified, locally-owned EPA framework work for schools without the documentation-heavy infrastructure most CBME models assume?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD
Other current
Alongside the Caribbean series, I write on a second, related question: whether dominant medical-education frameworks (communication, reflective practice) teach the internal neurological and psychological capacities they assume, or only their behavioural surface.
Empathy from the outside in
The missing internal foundations of medical communication skills curricula.
Research question: Do dominant communication-skills frameworks develop the internal capacities they assume — interoceptive awareness, emotion regulation — or only the outward behaviors?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD, and Ana Claudia Alves-Nogueira, PhD (University of Coimbra)
Reflection without foundations
What neuroscience reveals about the missing prerequisites of reflective practice in medical education
Research question: Do dominant reflective-practice frameworks (Gibbs, Schön, Boud, AMEE Guide 44) develop the cognitive, emotional, and embodied capacities that genuine reflection actually requires — or just assume them?
Author:
Mahé Pereira, MD