Deborah O'Mara

Deborah O'Mara serves as Honorary Professor in the Sydney Medical School, Faculty of Medicine and Health, at the University of Sydney. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and is Principal Consultant at Deborah O'Mara Consulting. Previously, she was Associate Professor and Head of Assessment in the Sydney Medical School, where she led efforts in developing and refining medical student assessment strategies, including the implementation of innovative tools like ExamBank for effective feedback and stable assessment across disciplines.

O'Mara's academic interests center on medical education assessment, with research spanning programmatic assessment, item characteristics in multiple-choice questions, prescribing skills evaluation, situational judgement tests for medical selection, interprofessional care, benchmarking with international examinations, and clinical skills teaching. Her key publications demonstrate this expertise: 'Associations between item characteristics and statistical performance for paediatric medical student multiple choice assessments' (2023), 'Evolution or revolution to programmatic assessment: Considering unintended consequences of assessment change' (2023), 'Evaluation of the Prescribing Skills Assessment implementation, performance and medical student experience in Australia and New Zealand' (2023), 'Student Perspectives on Programmatic Assessment in a Large Medical Program: A Critical Realist Analysis' (2022), 'Policy impact considerations for using an SJT to improve diversity in medical selection' (2022), 'Senior medical students as assistants in medicine in COVID-19 crisis: a realist evaluation protocol' (2021), 'Standard setting in Australian medical schools' (2018), 'Benchmarking in Australia using the International Foundations of Medicine Clinical Science Examination' (2016), 'The Australian Medical Schools Assessment Collaboration: benchmarking the preclinical performance of medical students' (2015), 'ExamBank: a Pedagogic and Administrative System to Provide Effective Student Feedback and Stable Assessment Across Disciplines' (2014), and 'Surgical teaching program for our senior medical students: room for improvement' (2014). These works have received 200 citations and over 12,000 reads. In 2017, as Associate Professor, she contributed to Sydney Medical School receiving an international award from the Association for Medical Education in Europe for its assessment processes.

Professional Email: deborah.omara@sydney.edu.au