Students as co-designers in health professional education: a scoping review

Background: Over the last thirteen years, there has been a notable increase in both research and practice related to student-staff partnerships in higher education. However, within health professional education (HPE), studies on these partnerships remain limited and often rely on broader higher education frameworks. Existing research primarily focuses on role dynamics and relational aspects rather than on structured co-design processes, where students actively contribute to shaping educational content, assessments, or curricula. Building upon previous work, this study specifically examines co-design as a distinct dimension of student-staff partnerships in HPE, an area that has not been thoroughly addressed in recent literature reviews. Methods: In accordance with the PRISMA-ScR 2018 statement, we performed searches in online databases—Cochrane, Ovid, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Scopus—for original articles published in English from 2010 to 2023. These articles needed to describe empirical studies focused on co-designed training programs in health professions. We then conducted a qualitative and descriptive analysis of the selected articles to examine how the principle of students as co-designers is portrayed and investigated in health professional education. Results: The search (title, abstract, keywords) identified 703 potentially relevant abstracts addressing co-design in healthcare education. Screening of these abstracts narrowed it down to 84 articles. Further evaluation of these full articles resulted in a final sample of 20 articles that met the inclusion criteria. We analyzed the content of these 20 articles using the following categories: basic characteristics (year of publication, country, professional domain, educational grade, topic of the training), co-design characteristics (context and initiative, framework and definition, purposes, stakeholders, process), and study characteristics (aim, research framework, population, data collection and analysis, key findings). Our analysis revealed that co-design ...