Global Pediatric Education Consortium

Training and Sustaining a Global Pediatric Workforce

History of the Curriculum: Developing a Standardized Approach to Post-graduate Training in Pediatrics
 
In 2010, the Global Pediatric Education Consortium (GPEC) embarked upon the arduous task of developing and recommending a standardized post-graduate pediatric curriculum that harmonizes best practices from around the world into a globally relevant, yet locally flexible format. This Curriculum addresses a number of the recommendations presented by the Lancet Commission on medical education (1). It is constructed around a competency-based framework that is built upon Bloom’s Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSA) approach to learning and training (2).
 
The Curriculum focuses specifically on training pediatric physicians to take the structured approach of History, Physical, Diagnosis, and Management plan to all aspects of medical care. And it focuses on learning outcomes as the basis for training and assessment during the post-graduate training period. With this approach, faculty and students can better link training to the expected level of proficiency necessary to practice competent, unsupervised general pediatrics.
 
Included in the curriculum is a chapter devoted to best-approaches for formative and summative assessment so that trainers, faculty, and trainees can attest to the competencies gained over time. An additional chapter provides recommended guidelines for developing or enhancing residency training programs that will optimize current best-approaches to training and provide assistance to faculty with implementation of a standardized curriculum. Finally, we will develop a chapter on how to implement the Curriculum into an existing or new training program and leverage the existing resources of the GPEC process.
 
GPEC is in the processes of enhancing the Curriculum to be more user friendly and accessible.  See the Curriculum Download page for updates.
 
References
 
1Frenk J, Chen L, Bhutta Z, Cohen J, Crisp N, Evans T, Fineberg H, et al. Health professionals for a new century: transforming education to strengthen the health systems in an interdependent world. The Lancet 2010; 376:1923–58.
 
2Bloom BS. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc; 1956.