The Competency Movement in Psychiatric Education (original) (raw)

2017, Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry

The principal aim of graduate medical education is to develop competent physicians-outstanding doctors who are able to care for patients with expertise, compassion, and skill. The June 2017 issue of Academic Psychiatry features a set of articles that focus on the critical topic of physician competence. Medical education underwent a major paradigm shift in the early 2000s, from structure-and process-based education, where training is defined by exposure to specific contents for specified periods of time, to competency-based education, where measurable, desired outcomes drive the educational process. Competency may be defined as "a complex set of behaviors built on the components of knowledge, skills, attitudes" and competence as personal ability [1]. Physicians-intraining must ultimately demonstrate competence in the six core competency domains of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and system-based practice. Beyond the definition of these key domains, implementing a competency-based curriculum involves four things: (1) identifying the competency, (2) identifying the competency component and performance level, (3)