McMAP SeniorFor all you medical education folks out there, you will know that learner assessment is a really hot topic these days. Competency-based medical education (CBME), entrustable professional activities (EPAs), milestones… These are all the fancy new terms that are floating out of most residency educator’s mouths. Herein we present our McMaster Modular Assessment Program (McMAP) in e-book form, courtesy of ALiEM Press.

Introducing the McMAP Project

For the past few years, I have been working with a big team here at McMaster University (“Mac” for short) on a project within our emergency medicine program.  With a large group of collaborators from across Canada and some experts from the U.S., Dr. Jonathan Sherbino (@Sherbino) and I have been hard at work creating the McMAP.

To excerpt from our innovation paper, the McMAP system was meant to:

‘…develop an assessment program organized around the CanMEDS physician competency framework and based on educational theory from the assessment literature. Two-person teams were tasked with developing eight EM-specific [workplace-based assessment] instruments. These instruments were structured as focused, partial mini-clinical evaluation exercises (CEXs)—essentially “micro”-CEXs—that could be used in a busy emergency department (ED) environment. Each instrument was mapped to a physician role from the CanMEDS competency framework at the junior level and the intermediate level. Each instrument was designed to provide a template for clinical faculty to assess resident competence in a key EM clinical task (e.g., performing a history, charting, obtaining consent for therapy) via direct observation. All instruments were peer reviewed and refined based on feedback.’ 

You an read more about the project in our paper in Academic Medicine. It is pre-press right now (and available free online), and will be published in the July 2015 edition (upon which it will then be available if you have institutional access).

The McMAP e-Books

At McMaster University, we really do believe that educational materials should be freely accessible and shared. (The #FOAMed spirit is very strong here…) As with some of our other recent projects (see the EMSimCases.com project), we believe that medical education can be vastly improved if we share our resources. As such, we have linked up with ALiEM to provide the EM education community with our McMAP Task booklets completely free and online.

You can find them online on the iTunes bookstore and ResearchGate for free:

Junior                     iTunes          ResearchGate

Intermediate         iTunes          ResearchGate

Senior                     iTunes          ResearchGate

What’s next?

The McMAP collaborators are now hard at working looking at various validation tests and studies to best understand the science behind how/what is working with our system. Please feel free to tweet us (@TChanMD or @Sherbino) for more information.

Teresa Chan, MD, MHPE
ALiEM Associate Editor
Emergency Physician, Hamilton
Associate Professor, McMaster University
Assistant Dean, Program for Faculty Development, McMaster University Ontario, Canada
Teresa Chan, MD, MHPE

@TChanMD

ERDoc. #meded #FOAMed Own views expressed. Contributor to @ALiEMteam, @WeAreCanadiEM, ICE Blog, #FeminEM. @MedEdLIFE founder. Works @McMasterU & @HamHealthSci