Competence by Design | Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine | School of Medicine

Our program will remain 5 years in length and be divided up into 4 stages; Transition to Discipline, Foundations, Core and Transition to Practice. Each stage will be organized around and defined by measurable Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) that must be attained by the end of the stage.

An EPA is an activity or a task that the learner ‘does’. These EPAs are uniform and consistent in all programs across the country. Assessment strategies will be linked to each EPA to facilitate multiple assessments and feedback opportunities for the learner. Each EPA will be comprised of many milestones that outline the progression and span the seven CanMeds domains. Click on each stage for further information.

Time becomes a resource rather than a prerequisite for program completion, although everyone realizes that there must be some time structure in order to provide health care services. The curriculum will be divided into rotations or ‘modules’ similar to what we have now in order to cover essential services and have an on-call schedule.

The support from the entire Queen’s University organization, in particular Dr. Walker and the Postgraduate Medical Education Office, as well as the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, has been instrumental in helping us develop and implement this curriculum. Multiple workshops and the development of a Queen’s University electronic platform for managing the curriculum and assessments have enabled us to succeed. Working together with all residency programs here at Queen’s to achieve a unified implementation across all specialties in July 2017 will enable us to align our programs in a consistent framework for our residents.