Over the past few years, I have been increasingly aware of how Emergency Medicine, as a specialty, has been under-appreciated by national accreditation organizations, such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME). The LCME essentially accredits all U.S. and Canadian medical schools and is sponsored by the AAMC and AMA. Accreditation standards address all aspects of medical student training and periodically gets revised.
This year, at the national AAMC meeting in Boston, there was a call for public comments on the proposed new ED-15 standard:
Standard ED-15
- The curriculum of the educational program must prepare students to enter any field of graduate medical education and include content that will prepare students to recognize wellness, determinants of health, opportunities for health promotion, and symptoms and signs of disease; develop differential diagnoses and treatment plans; and assist patients in addressing health-related issues involving all organ systems and spanning the life cycle.
- It is expected that the curriculum will be guided by the contemporary content from and clinical experiences associated with, among others, the disciplines and related subspecialties that have traditionally been titled family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, public health, and surgery.
So, yesterday Dr. Dave Wald (Chair of CDEM) released an official letter on behalf of CDEM to the LCME. The proposed wording changes have the backing of the Alliance of Clinical Education (ACE) and the major EM organizations such as AACEM, AAEM, ACEP, CORD, and SAEM. I just posted it onto the CDEM website. If you'd like to read the well-crafted letter, you can download it here.
In brief, here are CDEM's official wording change recommendations (changes in red):
New Proposed Standard ED-15
- The curriculum of the educational program must prepare students to enter any field of graduate medical education and include content that will prepare students to recognize wellness, determinants of health, and opportunities for health promotion, to recognize and interpret symptoms and signs of disease; to evaluate undifferentiated patients, to develop differential diagnoses and treatment plans; to acquire decision making skills in acute care situations, to formulate evidence-based management for chronic diseases, and to assist patients in addressing health-related issues involving all organ systems and spanning the life cycle.
- It is expected that the curriculum will be guided by the contemporary content from and clinical experiences associated with, among others, the disciplines and related subspecialties that have traditionally been titled emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, public health, and surgery.