Clinical Competencies for Medical Students

Pictured above: Research Intern Keith Miller with Ariane Kaplan, M.D.

How do we know whether today’s medical students are receiving enough education and training in ophthalmology? Currently, there are no objective, standardized clinical competencies for the specialty.

Ariane Kaplan, M.D., Associate Professor and Director of Medical Student Education at Kellogg, is working to fill that void. Using the standardized competencies established for residency education by the American College of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) as a template, she has developed the first Ophthalmology Clinical Competencies (OCCs) for medical students.

“Like the ACGME competencies for residents, these OCCs codify the ophthalmology knowledge and skills a medical student should have attained by graduation,” explains Dr. Kaplan. “They give students concrete goals for developing their clinical skills, while giving educators guidelines for creating an ophthalmology curriculum.”

A pilot of this first generation of OCCs is currently underway at Kellogg, evaluating their usability for students and faculty raters/graders. “We want to make sure that we are measuring the right things,” Dr. Kaplan says, “and that the scoring structure yields reliable, consistent results from one student to another, and one faculty evaluator to another.”

Dr. Kaplan began the project when she was selected to participate in the U-M Medical School’s Medical Education Scholars Program (MESP). The MESP promotes educational scholarship and improves teaching and leadership skills of Medical School faculty leaders.

Preliminary feedback on the OCCs is very positive. “If shown to be useful for medical students and educators,” she says, “this could lead to the development of similar clinical competencies in other domains.”