CORD

The Council of Residency Directors (CORD) in Emergency Medicine is next week in Denver.  This year's hot-button topic is the Milestones, the foundation of a new outcomes-based resident evaluation process.






I'll be presenting a research abstract called, "How Do Practicing Emergency Attendings Self-Evaluate on the Emergency Medicine Milestones?" at the Milestones Bootcamp session on March 6th.  It is a study which attempts to begin the process of independently validating the milestones.

As part of its Next Accreditation System, the ACGME commissioned committees to draft, endorse, and implement specialty specific milestones.  For EM, what ensued was a collaborative step wise process to create milestones which centered around the clear definition of what would be come to be known as Level 4, the minimum standard of competency needed to graduate residency and practice emergency medicine successfully.  The EM milestones will be used to track resident progress by residency programs beginning in the 2013 academic year. 

We have begun to attempt validation of the ACGME EM Milestones.  We will be recruiting representatives from residencies across the country to partner with us to explore the creation of a multicenter effort to continue to study the Milestones.  We will have a sign up after the talk on March 6th as well as at the poster session.

If you're interested in validating the milestones, post a comment or let's meet at CORD.

Excited,

Timothy Peck

SAEM's Emergency Medicine Milestones

The SAEM released its educational milestones on their website this week; these are a comprehensive set of skills that every emergency physician should possess by the time they graduate residency.  The resident's level of competence for each skill is graded on a 5 point scale.

The significance of the publication of these milestones is great.  I have often advocated to reevaluate the arbitrary means of granting graduation in medical education.  Just because you got through 3 or 4 years of residency, does not mean that you deserve to graduate residency (the same goes for medical school).  To be elevated from one level to the next, you should be required to prove that you have hit the necessary milestones to move on to the next level.  The recently published milestones can help make that a reality, and introduce a better system to ensure our patients that the physicians who take care of them are truely competent.  The ridiculousness of standardized paper board exams may be done away with or at least deprioritized.