Evaluation and construction of a profile of professional competences in internal medicine

Abstract

Objective: characterize the performance profile of the internal medicine doctor according to the proposed professional competences and establish relationships with the profile of current training in this specialty in Colombia.

Study design: joint cross-sectional study, for 11 months, with informed consent and Ethics Committee.

Participants: managers, internists, teaching internists, residents.

Interventions: thorough interviews, survey and programs analysis. Anonymous survey, according to the qualitative analysis of interviews. Triangulations for validity and reliability by sources (literature, participants, programs), instruments (interview, survey, grid analysis programs) and type of participants.

Analysis: Atlas.ti 5.0 qualitative, quantitative Excel 2007.

Results: 45 interviewed, 190 polled and two programs analyzed to propose a profile of training by professional competences with socio-constructivist pedagogical approach.

This proposed profile reconfirms the professional competences of literature but new ones arose:

• Specific emerging nuclear, which give the deontological identity or reason for being an internist, arethe capacities to integrate patient problems, organize concepts of subspecialities, be skilled in prevalent diseases, be support for medical and surgical specialists and act in different levels of care and scenarios.
• Classic clinics and new ones like emphasizing health promotion and disease prevention.
• Cross-emerging: communicative, professionalism, administrative, pedagogic, in research.

Conclusion: the profile of resident training continues to focus on objectives and fragmented rotationsin internal medicine and subspecialities; an empirical approach in clinical skills and medical knowledgethrough teaching-service agreements is inferred; there is lack of formal development of cross and nuclearspecific competences