[SIMULATION AS A TRAINING AND ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR COMPETENCY BASED MEDICAL EDUCATION - A REGULATORY CHALLENGE]

Competency Based Medical Education (CBME) is an educational approach that occupies a central place in medical education. Medical education is accountable for the graduates' professional level, ensuring they are skilled and competent in all key areas of their profession. Adopting CBME underscores the importance of simulation-based training. Experiential training provides, among other things: standardization of training, controlled exposure to extreme events and soft skills, such as patient-caregiver communication and teamwork training. Unlike the traditional apprentice approach, accountability reinforces the choice of a preliminary encounter with simulated patients prior to real-life care, as a complimentary tool for improving patient safety. Incorporating a practical exam is self-evident in CBME because of the need to ensure that the examinees are competent to provide unsupervised safe and quality care. Implementation of a national CBME program, likewise, incorporating simulation into national training programs, requires involvement and supervision on health system regulators. In this paper, we describe simulation-based national training programs that to date integrate competency-based training in the various medical sectors. As national programs, they are implemented under the guidance and in cooperation with the regulators. On the one hand, CBME is a new approach and its implementation will require time and the cooperation of many stakeholders. On the other hand, simulation is an existing, well-established training and assessment tool that can be used as an anchor around which you can start building the competency-based training programs.