Toward development of a comprehensive medical education program in the Republic of Armenia
I would like to work with the Armenian Ministry of Health, and the Yerevan State Medical University to develop a system of postgraduate education for physicians, to standardize and improve the quality of healthcare in Armenia. My vision would be to create a product that is marketable to other countries.
The Republic of Armenia is a small country with a population of approximately 3,000,000. Armenia's medical system has evolved from the Soviet style system. Their several medical schools have produced an abundance of physicians who are generally viewed by outsiders as poorly trained.
In recent years, Armenia has worked toward reintroducing a system of medical licensure and in 2016 created a requirement for continuing medical education for practicing physicians. The 45 hour requirement each year is based on the requirement for physicians practicing in Russia. The requirements in United States of America is very by state but are generally 20 to 25 hours per year.
Accreditation for continuing medical education for physicians is granted by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) or by organizations Such As the California Medical Association, designated by ACCME to accredit CME providers.
ACCME strongly encourages a process by which the educational needs are defined in order to address professional practice gaps. An example of the professional practice gap might be high rates of diabetes and diabetic related disease in a community. The underlying educational needs could be to address the way physicians evaluate diabetic patients, develop treatment plans, communicate with patients, coordinate care with each other, evaluate our own performance as physicians, learn to perform a foot exam, work appropriately medicate patients to improve outcomes. Ideally, the practice gaps in educational needs will be data-driven.
Other features in the ideal system might include collaboration between organizations working towards the same goals, sharing of knowledge and data, creating useful feedback for learners, reinforcement of desirable physician attributes, and so on. Many of the educational activities targeting physicians in the US do not go into this depth. A "one and done" style of education is to ask the speaker to give a one-hour presentation about diabetes, or hypertension, or heart disease, possibly over lunch, and leave it at that. In many cases, there is an unfortunate tendency to confuse CME with a PowerPoint lecture to a room full of learners. It can be difficult to convince a CME provider that they are not one and the same thing.
Armenia's current continuing medical education is largely based on lectures and Internet-based learning. Medical professionals in the diaspora can participate either in person locally or through the remote learning facilities that have evolved over the past 10+ years. There tends to be a one-size-fits-all approach, similar to my experience in California, with the physician audience having varying degrees of familiarity with the topic.