Date of response: 12 February 2024
We have now considered your request of 25 January 2024 for the following information:
I am writing to request all available performance data for students enrolled in the Physician Associate programme regarding their outcomes in the Physician Associate National Examination (PANE).
Question 1. The number of students enrolled in the Physician Associate programme each year for the last five years.
Our response:
| | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 (exam 2023) | 2020 (exam 2022) | (2019 (exam 2021) | 2018 (exam 2020) | 2017 (exam 2019) |
| Total number of students initially enrolled in Y1 in January | 25 | 35 | 25 | 27 | 24 | 26 | 25 |
Question 2. The number of students who passed and failed the PANE for each of these years, broken down into the two components of the PANE (the online knowledge based assessment and the OSCE)
Our response:
| | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 |
| No. of students who passed online/written assessment on first attempt | 21 | 23 | 22 | 25 | 25 |
| No. of students who failed online/written assessment on first attempt | 0 | 0 | <5 | 0 | 0 |
| No. of students who passed the OSCE – first attempt | 21 | 17 | 19 | 21 | 25 |
| No. of students who failed the OSCE – first attempt | 0 | 6 | <5 | <5 | 0 |
| No. of students who passed the OSCE – second attempt | N/A | 6 | <5 | <5 | 0 |
Please note that the figures provided above may not be a full and accurate record of the results, as they only contain data where the candidate has provided consent for their results to be shared with the University by the Royal College of Physicians.
We have been advised that any person requesting full data in relation to the results of candidates taking the Physician Associate National Exams should contact the Physician Associate exams unit directly via email: PAExams@rcp.ac.uk.
Please also note that as this is a two-year course, and exams would be taken in the third year, therefore students starting in 2019 will not take their final exams until 2021.
Most students sit these exams in January and those that sit in May are usually students that failed in January and are undertaking resits. All students must sit and pass the written and OSCE.
Values less than 5:
We can confirm that the University does hold this data. However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.
Due to the small numbers involved, it would be possible to identify a living individual(s) from this information and, therefore, we would consider it to be personal data. Disclosure of this personal data would contravene the first data protection principle of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that being Principle (a) –lawfulness, fairness, and transparency. We consider that disclosure would constitute unfair processing of the data as any individual would reasonably expect for their data to remain confidential and not released to the public. The University is only permitted to disclose personal data if to do so would be fair, lawful, and transparent. Therefore, the requirements of this exemption are met, and we are unable to disclose this information.
To ensure that we do not inadvertently release personal data in this response or in combination with other publicly available data, we have replaced all values between 1 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.