What are the top medical education issues for physicians this year? Hear from a med ed expert about the topics you should keep an eye on.
AMA Wire® talked with Darlyne Menscer, MD, who will start her one-year term as the chair of the AMA Council on Medical Education at the 2015 AMA Annual Meeting. A clinical associate professor in family medicine at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., Dr. Menscer has been a member of the Council on Medical Education since 2009.
Dr. Menscer outlined the council’s top three priorities for the upcoming year:
Transforming medical education
The AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative, which got underway in 2013, is moving full speed ahead. The council has been monitoring the initiative’s progress and joining the consortium of 11 schools at its meetings to better understand the many changes schools are implementing now. For example, the consortium is discussing the possibility of a new core science and asking medical students what they wish they were learning.
“We’re fortunate that one of the AMA’s key areas of interest is med ed,” Dr. Menscer said. “I think it’s going quite well. I see that the national media is concerned about medical education, and we have the useful information about our initiative that we can put forward.”
Graduate medical education (GME)
“Medical students who are U.S. graduates and don’t have a place to complete their training after medical school—that’s a national crisis,” Dr. Menscer said. “It’s poor planning in the absolute worse sense of the word, but the solutions are clearly not simple.”
“Not simple” is right—from the Institute of Medicine’s system overhaul recommendations to the Association of American Medical College’s GME roadmap to the AMA council’s own call for innovative solutions, there are many moving pieces in the effort to transform GME.
But the AMA Council on Medical Education expects to hear more proposals about GME in the near future and plans to sift through all proposed solutions to whittle down to the best policy.
Maintenance of certification (MOC)
Traditionally a hot-button topic, Dr. Menscer and the council expect a lot of debate over MOC in the near term. In February, the American Board of Internal Medicine apologized for getting its MOC programs wrong and releasing them before they were ready.
“My personal hope is that people will recognize that, although some parts of the board certification system may be rightly criticized, to say the entire system of physician accountability for continued competence should be thrown out with the bathwater is a huge mistake,” Dr. Menscer said. “Complaining is very easy to do—finding appropriate solutions is much harder.”
Physicians at the 2014 AMA Interim Meeting voted to update the AMA’s MOC policy, emphasizing the need for an evidence-based process that is evaluated regularly to ensure physicians’ needs are being met and activities are relevant to clinical practice.
In June, the AMA and American Board of Medical Specialties convened stakeholders in Chicago to discuss Part III of the MOC exam, focusing on the value of MOC Part III and innovative concepts that could potentially enhance or replace the secure exam requirement.
Regardless of what issues come before the council, its No. 1 job is to stick to the facts and support the best policy possible.
“We have to hear all voices and weigh them against the facts,” Dr. Menscer said. “We have to strategize what can be done, what venues we can speak in to have an effect and where we can advocate.”
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