Abstract
Introduction. Medical education has defined essential “universal” core competencies. The value of global health education gained through participation in a health-promoting school project was assessed using Canada’s CanMEDS roles and competencies.Methods. The project involved health care trainees in delivery of “Brighter Smiles,” a global health education program addressing children’s oral health in Canada and Uganda based on the WHO health-promoting (HP) school model. Multidisciplinary teams first visit a Canadian First Nations community for an introduction to HP schooling, team building, and experience working in different cultural environments and then have 4–6 weeks of global health project delivery in rural HP schools in Uganda in partnership with local College of Health Sciences trainees/faculty. Learning opportunities afforded were evaluated by conventional questionnaire and pilot categorization against the 7 CanMEDS roles (divided into 126 core competencies).Results. All collaborator and health Advocate competencies and 16/17 of the communicator roles were addressed. Overall, project experience included 88 (70%) of the 126 competencies.Conclusions. This pilot suggests CanMEDS criteria can be used to effectively evaluate trainee participation in HP school program delivery, allowing the comprehensive educational opportunities to acquire global health knowledge and skills reported by conventional evaluation to be formally categorized against defined educational roles and competencies.
Highlights
Medical education has defined essential “universal” core competencies
This paper describes the use of a Canadian form of “universal” core competencies for medical education, the CanMeds criteria, to evaluate the value and relevance of global health education opportunities afforded to health care trainees by participation in delivery of a child health project based in health-promoting schools
The learning opportunities and educational value trainees derive from participation in global health education delivery in health-promoting schools using the “Brighter Smiles” version of the World Health Organization (WHO) model have been reported previously, using data from conventional evaluation questionnaires and videotaped interviews [7, 9, 10]
Summary
Medical education has defined essential “universal” core competencies. The value of global health education gained through participation in a health-promoting school project was assessed using Canada’s CanMEDS roles and competencies. This pilot suggests CanMEDS criteria can be used to effectively evaluate trainee participation in HP school program delivery, allowing the comprehensive educational opportunities to acquire global health knowledge and skills reported by conventional evaluation to be formally categorized against defined educational roles and competencies. The CanMEDS roles have been integrated into the Royal College’s accreditation standards, undergraduate health sciences curricula, objectives for postgraduate training, and final in-training evaluations Each of these roles is further defined by “key competencies,” which are further divided into “enabling competencies” that the practicing health professional will need to have and that trainees need to develop and demonstrate for qualification following residency training. Some of these competencies are difficult to experience within the context of conventional
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