Teaching and assessing the ACGME competencies in surgical residency.

Abstract

he Accreditation Council for Graduate Medi-cal Education (ACGME) Outcome Project is an educational reform that shifts the process of program accreditation from a system that valued a program’s potential to train its residents to a system that requires the actual measurement of educational outcomes 1among residents. The Outcome Project re-quires residency programs to implement a curriculum covering six core competencies and to provide evidence of resident learning within these competencies via as-sessment 2by July 2011. With this date only three years away, many programs are adopting and implementing new curricular materials and assessment to meet the Outcome Project requirements. The six core competencies—patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement (PBLI), interpersonal and communication skills, pro-fessionalism, and systems-based practice (SBP)—were developed by the ACGME in the early 1990s and offi-cially endorsed in 1999. Beginning in 2001, the ACGME constructed a three-phase timeline that culminates with the full integration of the competencies and their assessment in resident education by 2011. The fourth and final phase of the Outcome Project involves the identification of benchmark programs and the nation-wide adoption of generalizable materials and methods from 2these programs.