CREATION AND USE OF A NATIONAL COMPETENCY BASED GERIATRICS EDUCATION CURRICULUM: WEBGEMS

摘要

In 2007 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the John A. Hartford Foundation hosted a National Consensus Conference on Competencies in Geriatric Education, leading to the creation of a set of 26 minimum medical student geriatrics competencies. Teaching these competencies has proved to be challenging due to lack of sufficient geriatrics educators at all medical schools and time in the medical school curriculum.To meet this challenge, in 2010, a group of educators came together to create the webGEMs curriculum (web-based Geriatrics Education Modules) and developed 25 peer-reviewed online case-based modules linked to the AAMC geriatrics competencies, available at POGOe.org. We have tracked use of the modules along with responses to voluntary end-of-module evaluations.To date, more than 8,000 medical, nurse practitioner, and physician assistant students have completed over 30,000 total cases, spending an average of 33 minutes per case. 7827 case evaluations have been completed, with 71% of responses rating the cases as good to excellent overall, 88% saying the case taught the key issues that a student should need on the topic, and 79% rating the case as a valuable use of the student’s time. Faculty rate the webGEMs has a highly effective and efficient way to impart geriatrics knowledge. In addition to distance/on-line learning, webGEMs have been successfully used for “flipped learning” teaching also.Although a laborious process, the creation of a national, web-based, geriatrics education curriculum for can result in thousands of trainees being taught core geriatrics competencies with excellent student evaluations.