Medical varsities to follow single curriculum for postgraduate training

Medical universities in Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and the federal capital on Monday settled on the idea to develop a single standard curriculum for postgraduate of doctors in the country following the US model of medical studies.

According to reports, the varsities agreed on following ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) model of USA and university residency program.

Rawalpindi Medical University Vice Chancellor Professor Muhammad Umar informed that the curriculum will be built on six skills sets including patient care, medical knowledge, professionalism, communication and interpersonal skills, practice-based learning and system-based practices.

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The professor described that the students will be allowed weightage for different skills. The weightage for the respective disciplines will look like this:

Patient care, medical knowledge will have 40% weightage, professionalism will be 30% and other two 20% are combined with the seventh competency which is research; it will be given 10% weightage.

The professor reportedly said that “The curriculum will shift the paradigm of post graduate medical education from exam oriented to training oriented. Specialist doctors will be trained continuously over four-year and five-year programmes and 75% weightage will be given to continuous internal assessment rather than examination.”

The vice-chancellor explained that unremitting internal assessment will be constructive as a trainee will be given constant feedback to progress along with the help of a supervisor and department of the medical university they will be committed with.

“The clinical skills will be evaluated by a workplace-based assessment system for Directly Observed Procedures (DOPs) and case-based discussions (CBDs),” said professor Umar.

360-degree multi-source feedback is another method of assessment that will be added to the curriculum, which would also be given a weightage in the final summative assessment.

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According to Professor Umar, based on an ACGME model, the university residency programme will remove all the deficiencies in 100 years old university-based medical education and will be parallel with any other modern system in the world and accepted in the Middle East.

There are six public universities in Punjab, one in KP, one in Balochistan and four to five in Sindh. It is hoped all will adopt the university residency programme. There are two systems of postgraduate system education in Pakistan - fellowship program of CPSP and MD/MS program of universities and Royal College UK also established their examination system in Pakistan last year.