A new roadmap for improving residents’ professional skills was released Tuesday by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
The Pathways to Excellence document is the latest development in the Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program, an ongoing initiative to assess the learning environment at each accredited teaching institution. It lays out the pathways to improve resident engagement in six core areas:
- Patient safety
- Health care quality
- Care transitions
- Supervision
- Duty hours
- Fatigue management and mitigation
- Professionalism
ACGME’s CEO Thomas J. Nasca, MD, called the new guidance “an important step in the delivery of patient care” in a news release.
“Building a cadre of young physicians who have the clinical skills to practice medicine in an increasingly complex health care system is the ACGME’s top priority,” Dr. Nasca said.
The CLER program will generate national data and institutional factors that advance both graduate medical education and quality patient care. The program began in 2012 as a way to improve the learning environment for medical residents and fellow physicians at teaching hospitals. An evaluation committee reviews data from institution site visits, then sets expectations for the institution and gives feedback.
The Pathways framework was developed based on observations from the first 100 site visits, focus group research and a review of published literature.
