RAWALPINDI: The Rawalpindi Medical University (RMU) is the first medical university to start a postgraduate residency training programme under the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) guidelines.
Talking to Dawn, RMU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Mohammad Umar said it was a six competency-based programme, including interpersonal communication, professionalism and practice-based learning. The RMU has added research as the seventh competency.
“The university has designed anew curriculum in 27 disciplines as per the ACCME certificate system of evaluation, monitoring and assessment. This is an assessment system based on 16 rotations in the four-year programme. Each rotation is evaluated by a supervisor and the dean,” he said.
“About 200 faculty members have been trained for the residency training programme’s implementation.”
Vice chancellor says four-year programme comprises seven competency components
The RMU also designed a special assessment model which has four components, including first-year in training assessment, mid-training assessmentand final assessment. The first and third are formation assessments, he said.The RMU is shifting totraining-based system from the exam-based systemwhich is practiced by other medical universities and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Pakistan (CPSP).
The vice chancellor said in the last 35 years there had been a deficiency of specialists in the country.
“As per the international standard, there is one specialist for 900 people. However, there is no data available in Pakistan in this regard. There are only 270,000 doctors registered with the Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) out which only 40,000 are specialists which are less than the requirement and international standards to provide specialised care to the 220 million population of Pakistan,” he said.
“In some fields, thereis even nospecialist available. To fill this gap, the government has decided to establish more medical universities in Punjab, particularly Lahore, to produce more specialists as well as to provide an opportunity to female doctors to further excel,” he said.
“The basic need to introduce the new system was to improve the standard of postgraduate medical education as per the World Federation for Medical Education and ACGME standards,” he said.
Presently, there are two systems of post-graduation in Pakistan: the universities’ exam programme and the fellowship programme run by the CPSP.Currently, there are about 19 public medical universities to take this initiative to upgrade the postgraduate training programme at a par with ACGME.
Prof Umar said the programme of the RMU would improve the postgraduate training system in the country.
Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2021