University of Health Sciences (UHS) has introduced PRIME, a province wide digital platform that brings the monitoring of medical education, clinical training and professional competency assessments in Punjab into a single system. Provincial Minister for Specialized Healthcare and Medical Education Khawaja Salman Rafique inaugurated the platform at UHS. In its first phase, PRIME will serve postgraduate medical and dental programs, covering approximately 3,300 trainees enrolled in MS, MD and MDS degrees at 33 training institutions across the province, and UHS will also register around 1,100 supervisors on the portal. The system will replace paper logbooks with digital records that document clinical cases, procedures, attendance, rotations, research work and workplace based assessments. Supervisors will verify the clinical and academic work of their trainees, share feedback and follow their progress over time, while dashboards at the institutional level will allow UHS to assess training standards and identify shortcomings. Paper logbooks are easy to misplace, hard to verify and difficult to compare across hospitals, so a shared digital record gives the university a clearer view of what is actually taking place in training units.
Speaking at the launch, Rafique praised UHS for creating a digital mechanism to monitor training and said he hoped PRIME would significantly improve postgraduate education. He added that the data collected through the platform would help pinpoint training gaps and guide decisions based on evidence, and that it would also support efforts to improve the performance of supervisors and institutions. UHS Vice Chancellor Maj Gen Prof Sohail Sabir (Retd) said PRIME would move health professions education beyond routine record keeping, with a stronger emphasis on demonstrated clinical competence and verified professional skills. In his view, a trainee should be judged by what they can show in practice and not only by the number of entries in a logbook, and a digital system makes it easier to collect that evidence in a consistent way.
Prof Sohail Sabir also outlined how the platform will expand. The second phase will cover undergraduate MBBS and BDS programs along with house job training, bringing approximately 33,875 students and house officers from 60 medical and dental colleges onto the system. The third phase will include Nursing, Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences programs, covering around 31,734 students at 180 institutions. Once all three phases are complete, PRIME is expected to reach a very large share of those who study and train in health professions across the province, which would give UHS a single source of information on training quality at many levels of the sector.
UHS Director Postgraduate Studies Prof Muhammad Asif Naveed briefed attendees on the functions of the portal and on how it will be put into practice. He said PRIME will include quarterly continuous internal assessments and workplace based evaluations, such as Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise (Mini-CEX), Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS) and Case Based Discussions. The portal will also track research progress and keep records of academic activities, and it will feature a learning management system along with dashboards at both institutional and university levels. Together these features are meant to give trainees, supervisors and administrators the same up to date picture of progress, so that problems can be spotted early and support can be offered before they affect the quality of training.
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