Background: Curriculum development and implementation for internal medicine point-of-care ultrasound (IM POCUS) continues to be a challenge for many residency training programs. Education indicators may provide a useful framework to support curriculum development and implementation efforts across programs in order to achieve a consistent high-quality educational experience.
Objective: This study seeks to establish consensus-based recommendations for education indicators for IM POCUS training programs in Canada.
Design: This consensus study uses a modified nominal group technique for voting in the initial round, followed by two additional rounds of online voting, with consensus defined as agreement by at least 80% of the participants.
Participants: Participants were 22 leaders with POCUS and/or education expertise from 13 Canadian internal medicine residency programs across 7 provinces.
Main measures: Education indicators considered were those that related to aspects of the POCUS educational system, could be presented by a single statistical measure, were readily understood, could be reliably measured to provide a benchmark for measuring change, and represented a policy issue. We excluded a priori indicators with low feasibility, are impractical, or assess learner reactions. Candidate indicators were drafted by two academic internists with post-graduate training in POCUS and medical education. These indicators were reviewed by two internists with training in quality improvement prior to presentation to the expert participants.
Key results: Of the 52 candidate education indicators considered, 6 reached consensus in the first round, 12 in the second, and 4 in the third round. Only 5 indicators reached consensus to be excluded; the remaining indicators did not reach consensus.
Conclusions: The Canadian Internal Medicine Ultrasound (CIMUS) group recommends 22 education indicators be used to guide and monitor internal medicine POCUS curriculum development efforts in Canada.
Keywords: curriculum/program evaluation; internal medicine; post-graduate medical education; quality assessment; ultrasound.