The promise of competency-based education in the health professions for improving global health
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The promise of competency-based education in the health professions for improving global health Larry D Gruppen1*, Rajesh S Mangrulkar1,2 and Joseph C Kolars2
Abstract Competency-based education (CBE) provides a useful alternative to time-based models for preparing health professionals and constructing educational programs. We describe the concept of ‘competence’ and ‘competencies’ as well as the critical curricular implications that derive from a focus on ‘competence’ rather than ‘time’. These implications include: defining educational outcomes, developing individualized learning pathways, setting standards, and the centrality of valid assessment so as to reflect stakeholder priorities. We also highlight four challenges to implementing CBE: identifying the health needs of the community, defining competencies, developing self-regulated and flexible learning options, and assessing learners for competence. While CBE has been a prominent focus of educational reform in resource-rich countries, we believe it has even more potential to align educational programs with health system priorities in more resource-limited settings. Because CBE begins with a careful consideration of the competencies desired in the health professional workforce to address health care priorities, it provides a vehicle for integrating the health needs of the country with the values of the profession. Improvements in global health can only be realized through the development of a workforce that has been educated to promote health and to care for those with disease [1]. Increased attention is being placed on competency-based education as a means for optimizing the preparation of health professionals. Competencybased education (CBE) is a framework for designing and implementing education that focuses on the desired performance characteristics of health care professionals. Although ‘competence’ has always been the implicit goal of more traditional educational frameworks, CBE makes this explicit by establishing observable and measurable performance metrics that learners must attain to be deemed competent. By contrast, more traditional frameworks have delineated the intended learning objectives of instruction [2-7] Learning objectives often focus on what the learner should ‘know’ whereas competencies focuses on what the learner should be able ‘to do’, (while
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Medical Education, University of Michigan Medical School, G1113 Towsley Center, 1500 E. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5201, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
acknowledging that learning objectives are often requisite but typically in and of themselves insufficient). There have been many definitions of ‘competence’ and ‘competencies’, all sharing many common features [6-9]. For this paper, we use Albanese et al.’s [10] five characteristics to define a competency:
A competency focuses on the performance of the end product or goal state of instruction Traditional education
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