Competency- Based Curriculum for Post- graduation in Community Medicine at a Medical College located in western India

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introduction: Curriculum or course needs to be monitored and evaluated to ensure that it is working as planned and also to identify areas for improvement. Implementing competency-based training in postgraduate medical education poses many challenges, but ultimately requires a demonstration that the learner is truly competent to progress in training or to the next phase of a professional career. Purpose: The purpose of this document was to design a competency-based curriculum in Community Medicine teaching and training of post graduates so that they could efficiently play their roles as Community Physician, Public Health Specialist, Health Manager, Faculty, Researcher and Occupational Physician. Methods: A needs assessment study using cross-sectional design reinforced a strong need of developing a common & structured curriculum in Community Medicine at the department studied and later to be scaled at state level. A Six-Step Approach to Curriculum Development was followed ( Kern et al., 2009) to design and implement the competency based curriculum. Results: Relevant feedback from teachers and students has been incorporated to prepare this document. Almost all students and faculty strongly agreed for the need of introducing formative assessment. They strongly perceived that a formative assessment would be helpful to motivate students and should have weight- age in university exams. It is learnt that there are challenges involved in operationalzing competency-based curriculum viz; requires more time and effort from faculty, at least in the initial phases of development. Other challenges include; finding ways to include internal assessment marks in the university examination. Conclusions: Competency based curriculum is feasible within a conventional medical curriculum. Benefits of such learning include improving knowledge and skills of learner that would lead to improved quality of health care.