Designing Assessment Programmes for the Model Curriculum for Emergency Medicine Specialists.

Abstract

There has been a proliferation of competency-based postgraduate training programmes in emergency medicine (EM) worldwide, including Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Several competency frameworks have been developed at national and international levels as a basis for competency-based postgraduate training programmes. These frameworks include the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies in the United States, the Canadian Medical Educational Directives for Specialists (CanMEDS), and Common Competences for Emergency Medicine in the United Kingdom. In response to this increased emphasis on competency-based education during postgraduate training in EM, the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM) has recently developed a model curriculum to define the basic minimum standards for specialist training in EM. The goal for specialist training in EM is to ensure that its trainees develop the necessary knowledge, skills, and professional attitudes to provide safe, expert, and independent emergency care within their own country. Accurate assessment of trainees’ progress during specialist training is of paramount importance to the educational process. In recent years there have been changes to the assessment process. Traditionally, assessment has been considered exclusively as a process of measuring whether trainees have acquired the necessary knowledge, skills, and professional attitudes to practice independently as a specialist in EM, or assessment of learning. However, it is now recognized that an equally important function of assessment is to stimulate the individual’s learning process—in other words, assessment for learning. This new paradigm of the role of assessment should be firmly embedded in the educational process. As a result of this conceptual change in assessment, there has been a shift from considering individual methods to programmes of assessment, to allow adequate sampling of performance of complex competencies in authentic contexts.