A ‘How-To-Guide’ for teaching and assessing Collaborator Role competencies in family medicine residency and health professional training programs

Abstract

Introduction: Collaborative practice competencies are essential for safe, effective practice in today’s health care system. Providing learners with formal teaching and assessment opportunities is a requirement for accreditation in medicine and other health professional programs. However, identifying and assessing a trainee’s ability to competently collaborate in practice across educational contexts remains challenging. Further, without common assessment tools for collaborative practice teaching opportunities, ensuring comparability of collaborative practice learning experiences is difficult. To address these challenges, the College of Family Physicians of Canada tasked an interprofessional group of educators to develop a practical ‘How to Guide’ to support educators and facilitate practice change in how we assess and teach the Collaborator Role competencies. As educators, we are often required to work from a variety of educational frameworks: programmatic evaluation objectives, key and enabling competencies and clinical domains of care as examples. By leveraging specific observable behaviours of collaborative practice, the ‘How to Guide’ links these frameworks and provides practical strategies for teaching and assessing these behaviours across educational contexts. Through these practical tools and strategies for teaching and assessment we expect not only to facilitate these processes but also to encourage consistency of programming and to ensure that health professional learners are supported in the attainment of these collaborator competencies. Purpose: This interactive workshop is designed to support educators in medicine and other health professions with teaching and assessing collaborator competencies. With reference to the CanMEDS 2015, participants will reflect on how they teach and assess the collaborator role within their own contexts; compare these opportunities with collaborator role teaching and assessment strategies implemented in Canada; and consider how the ‘How to Guide’ for the Collaborator Role can support their teaching and assessment of collaborative practice competencies. Learning objectives: By the end of this workshop participants will be able to: 1. Identify opportunities to teach and assess the collaborator role in their teaching context. 2. Describe common teaching and assessment practices for collaborator role competencies 3. Access and apply the How to Guide to support their teaching and assessment of the collaborator role. Targeted Population and Stakeholders: Teachers / preceptors, program directors, health professional educators, medical residents and health professional learners, curriculum developers and assessment leads Timeline: This work took place from 2013 to 2016 to coincide with the release of the 2015 CanMEDS framework. The How-To-Guide will accompany the roll-out across Canada for the 2017 CanMEDS FM (Family Medicine) competency framework. Sustainability and Transferability: The How-To-Guide is relevant to all health professional educators in their role of preparing future health professionals to be competent to practice in integrated and interprofessional care models. The How-To-Guide was created by an interprofessional group of educators to ensure its relevancy to all health professional training programs. The guide is expected to be available for educators on an ongoing basis for the next decade. Its revision would likely coincide with the 10 year-review of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Canada CanMEDs framework in 2025. This workshop will be facilitated in both English and French.