The Retrospective Research: the Effect of Post Graduate Year Training (PGY) on Physicians’ Core Competency, Specialty Preference and Future Accomplishment.

In 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS attacked Taiwan and rapidly spread. It not only caused the death of several dedicated health professions, but also pointed out the defect of our healthcare system. Due to the medical education policies, our medical students lack the opportunity to receive trainings about General Medicine upon graduation; therefore, when epidemic diseases burst in Taiwan, our physicians don’t have the ability to effectively control the disease spread. In order to improve public health and assure social welfare, Post Graduate Year Training (PGY) was implemented in August 2003 and it provided various experiences of medical services, including emergency, community services, and as well as treatment of common diseases. In the other hand, problem of unbalanced physician structure becomes worse; it not only affects quality of medical services, accessibility of patients, but also has significant influences on medical expenditure. Our study aims to include these two issues about medical education: we would like to discover PGY training’s effect on medical students’achievement, by implementing surveys to alumni of Medicine School. We use the concept of core competency which was brought up by Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) as an indicator to evaluate effectiveness of PGY training. We also would like to get a clue to medical students’achievement after their graduation; therefore, each alumnus will be asked their current position and their academic background in the survey. Furthermore, questions about their medical specialty choices will be also included in this survey. In addition to the survey, we will design a series of new courses for assisting medical students to choose their specialties. After collecting alumni’s different opinions about PGY training, personal achievement, and as well as the reasons why they chose their medical specialties, we expect to have a conclusion of the effectiveness of PGY training on physicians.

Project ID:PF10008-0975
External Project ID:NSC100-2511-S182-003