Determining competence of psychiatric residents in the USA

Editors' introduction Following on from the previous chapter, where Richard Summers describes the national changes occurring in the United States Postgraduate Psychiatric Assessments, Joan Anzia and John Manring outline the manner in which local training programme directors have responded to these changes. There are examples of local and national collaboration amongst programme directors to produce innovative methods of assessing trainee performance and some of these are outlined in this chapter. There are accounts of the development of workplace-based assessment tools and processes by programme directors, who have harnessed their educational and professional expertise to create performance-based assessment programmes that are aimed at fulfilling both the developmental and decision-making needs of assessments in postgraduate training. Introduction As Richard Summers described in Chapter 7, medical education in the USA is extraordinarily complex and often fragmented because of the sheer number of stakeholders involved and the hierarchy of their different goals and values. In our academic culture, the process of medical education is divided into discrete segments of training, producing a patchwork progression rather than the ideal seamless voyage from undergraduate (college or university) education, through medical school, residency, fellowship, state licensure, attending psychiatrist status and finally Board certification. Darryl Kirch MD, President of the Association of American Medical Colleges, stated at the 2009 Meeting of the Association for Academic Psychiatry, ‘We need to create a true continuum that is seamless.’