Scholarly Activity in Medical Education

As part of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) serves as health improvement advisor to the nation.  When addressing the quality crisis in US healthcare, the IOM produced recommendations for academic health centers and other institutions responsible for the education and training of future health professionals.  Those recommendations included the following:

• Education on working in interdisciplinary teams,
• Creation of core competency areas across all professions,
• Expansion of curriculum to include quality improvement and systems level issues,
• Better training on interacting with patients to achieve optimal outcomes, and
• Exposure to quality research experiences.

Though each recommendation is important, the IOM emphasized that all
health professionals benefit from exposure to research whether they eventually become clinical researchers or not.  Skills acquired through research experiences facilitate the adoption of a lifelong learning model of applying an evidence base for optimal patient care. 

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which is responsible for the accreditation of medical residency programs in the US, put the IOM recommendations into action by creating the General Competencies.  The ACGME General Competencies are:

• Medical knowledge,
• Patient care/clinical skills,
• Interpersonal & communication skills,
• Practice-based learning & improvement,
• Professionalism, and
• System-based practice.

While research skills are implicated in all of the ACGME competencies, those in boldface are most directly related and informed by research experiences.