Toward a Glossary of Competency-Based Medical Education Terms

Abstract

Competency-based medical education (CBME) is now the standard for physician education, highlighted by the implementation of competency-based Milestones1 at the graduate medical education level for all specialties by July 1, 2014. However, transitioning to CBME has been both difficult and bewildering, particularly as a student seeking assurance that my medical school education is preparing me to succeed in a competency-focused residency program. Even understanding CBME literature is difficult for a newcomer to the education field. Terms, such as competence and competency-based medical education are frequently used, but lack consistent definitions.2,3 What is really meant when my attending tells me I am competent or even, dyscompetent or starts talking about Milestones? Scholars also recognize this problem—individual authors and collaborators have worked to review term usage and promote universal definitions.4–,6 However, those definitions have not been widely adopted, as evidenced by the continued reframing of terms in subsequent articles. To address this issue, we first identified “key elements” of commonly used CBME terms and used those elements to create a succinct definition for each term.