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Patient care: The basis of all competencies

Residency Program Connection, September 25, 2007

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One of the challenges in documenting any individual competency is that they are all interrelated in some manner. For instance, you cannot evaluate practice-based learning and improvement without understanding the impact of systems-based practice on how the physician practices. Similarly, it is difficult to evaluate communication by itself, without evaluating professionalism and medical knowledge. The competency of patient care, then, overlaps with all other competencies, as it is the lynchpin of a physician's education and the reason for training well-rounded physicians-to ensure patients are receiving the best treatment possible.

Because patient care is the basis of our profession, all other competencies should improve patient care. The ACGME's expectations may be grouped into three components:

When developing your curriculum, you will find more than adequate opportunity for not only teaching the competency of patient care, but also for its evaluation. For example, every patient encounter and every case conference are hands-on settings for teaching patient care.

Editor's Note: The above material is excerpted from A Practical Guide to Teaching and Assessing the ACGME Core Competencies by Ruth Nawotniak, MS, CTAGME, Elizabeth A. Rider, MSW, MD, FAAP, and Gary Smith, EdD, and published by HCPro, Inc.

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