Competency Based Medical Education

Competence By Design (CBD) is the Royal College’s model of competency-based medical education. Our program began a soft launch of CBD during the 2018-2019 academic year, and CBD was officially launched in Internal Medicine across the country on July 1, 2019. Residents in our program will receive an introduction to CBD during aa academic half day bootcamp session in early July. Residents will be expected to complete 1-2 entrustable professional activity (EPA) observations per week (6 observations per block), in order to obtain the required amount of entrusted observations for each EPA and each stage of training. 

Each resident will be assigned an academic advisor. The academic advisor will have access to all EPA-related feedback (via RCPSC ePortfolio) that residents are given on each rotation, as well as their in-training evaluation reports (ITERs). The academic advisor will act as a coach, meeting with trainees about 2-3 times per year to help synthesize the feedback, and to help develop a plan for improvement. The academic advisors also attend competence committee meetings about twice per year to discuss the performance of the residents. 

The U of C is using the Royal College’s platform, ePortfolio, to track EPA completion. We provide residents with EPA pocketbooks that offer an easy way to view the topics and requirements of each EPA. A spreadsheet will be ready soon to simplify the tracking of the subtypes of EPA observations that are obtained, and those that are still needed. Updates regarding CBD are provided throughout the year in the CBD Corner portion of the IMRP weekly newsletter.

CBD will allow for more structured feedback to be provided to each resident, with the goal of improving performance. Tips for completing EPAs will be provided on a regular basis, and if you have concerns about barriers affecting your completion of EPAs, we ask that you discuss this with your academic advisor.

Dr. Darren Burback, FRCPC
CBD lead, Internal Medicine Residency Program