Integrating the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Core competencies into the model of the clinical practice of emergency medicine.

In response to public pressure for greater accountability from the medical profession, a transformation is occurring in the approach to medical education and assessment of physician competency. Over the past 5 years, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has implemented the Outcomes and General Competencies projects to better ensure that physicians are appropriately trained in the knowledge and skills of their specialties. Concurrently, the American Board of Medical Specialties, including the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM), has embraced the competency concept. The core competencies have been integral in ABEM's development of Emergency Medicine Continuous Certification and the development of the Model of Clinical Practice of Emergency Medicine (Model). ABEM has used the Model as a significant part of its blueprint for the written and oral certification examinations in emergency medicine and is fully supportive of the effort to more fully define and integrate the ACGME core competencies into training emergency medicine specialists. To incorporate these competencies into our specialty, an Emergency Medicine Competency Taskforce (Taskforce) was formed by the Residency Review Committee-Emergency Medicine to determine how these general competencies fit in the Model. This article represents a consensus of the Taskforce with the input of multiple organizations in emergency medicine. It provides a framework for organizations such as the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD) and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine to develop a curriculum in emergency medicine and program requirement revisions by the Residency Review Committee-Emergency Medicine. In this report, we describe the approach taken by the Taskforce to integrate the ACGME core competencies into the Model. Ultimately, as competency-based assessment is implemented in emergency medicine training, program directors, governing bodies such as the ACGME, and individual patients can be assured that physicians are competent in emergency medicine.