The public health leadership certificate: a public health and primary care interprofessional training opportunity.

This article describes a public health leadership certificate curriculum developed by the Commonwealth Public Health Training Center for employees in public health and medical trainees in primary care to share didactic and experiential learning. As part of the program, trainees are involved in improving the health of their communities and thus gain a blended perspective on the effectiveness of interprofessional teams in improving population health. The certificate curriculum includes eight one-credit-hour didactic courses offered through an MPH program and a two-credit-hour, community-based participatory research project conducted by teams of trainees under the mentorship of health district directors. Fiscal sustainability is achieved by sharing didactic courses with MPH degree students, thereby enabling trainees to take advantage of a reduced, continuing education tuition rate. Public health employee and primary care trainees jointly learn knowledge and skills required for community health improvement in interprofessional teams and gain an integrated perspective through opportunities to question assumptions and broaden disciplinary approaches. At the same time, the required community projects have benefited public health in Virginia.

Prerequisite competencies for third-year clerkships: an interdisciplinary approach.

The Collaborative Curriculum Project (CCP) is one of three components of the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project (FMCRP), a federally funded effort to provide resources for medical education curricula at the beginning of the 21st century. Medical educators and staff from public and private geographically distributed medical schools and national specialty organizations in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics developed by consensus essential clinical competencies that all students should have by the beginning of the traditional clerkship year. These competencies are behaviorally measurable and organized into the domains used for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies. Exemplary teaching, assessment, and faculty development resources are cited, and attention is given to budgetary considerations, application to diverse populations and settings, and opportunities for integration within existing courses. The CCP also developed a subset of competencies meriting higher priority than currently provided in the pre-clerkship years. These priority areas were empirically validated through a national survey of clerkship directors in six disciplines. The project's documents are not intended to prescribe curricula for any school but rather to provide curricular decision makers with suggestions regarding priorities for allocation of time and resources and detailed clinical competency statements and other resources useful for faculty developing clinical courses in the first 2 years of medical school.

Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project: the future.

Under contract to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) created an undergraduate medical education curricular resource designed to train physicians to practice in the 21st century. An interdisciplinary group of more than 35 educators worked for 4 years to create the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource (FMCR). By consensus, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies were adopted as the theoretical framework for this project. The FMCR provides materials for the preclerkship years, the third-year family medicine clerkship, the postclerkship year, and faculty development, as well as guidance for integrating topics of special interest to the federal government (such as, geriatrics, Healthy People 2010, genetics, informatics) into a 4-year continuum of medical education. There are challenges inherent in implementing each component of the FMCR. For example, can the ACGME competency-based approach be adapted to undergraduate medical education? Can the densely packed preclerkship years be adapted to include more focused effort on developing these competencies, and whose job is it anyway? What is "core" to being a competent clinician, and what information can be obtained when needed from medical informatics sources? Will family medicine educators embrace the FMCR recommendations for their third-year clerkships? Will exit assessment of the competency levels of graduating medical students be achieved, and can it make them more capable residents? Can faculty in different clinical and educational settings integrate the teaching of "how to learn" into their repertoire? How will faculty development innovation progress in a time of increasing emphasis on clinical productivity? Developing a common language and adoption of core competencies for all levels of medical education is imperative in a society that is focusing on improving health care quality and outcomes. The FMCR Project has developed a curricular resource to assist medical educators in this task. The challenge for the future is to measure how the FMCR is used and to ascertain if it has an influence on better patient and system outcomes.