Curriculum Mapping

The Structure of Specialty Training: Curriculum Mapping

The last few years have seen considerable change within postgraduate medical education with the introduction of new national regulatory bodies (PMETB and now GMC) which approve and mandate specialty curricula designed by the various medical Royal Colleges. Having once established mandated curricula, the next step for a regulatory body is look at the congruence and fit between national requirements and local provision.

KSS Deanery has taken a pro-active approach to this national development and, as this edition of the guide is going to press, is completing a first curriculum mapping exercise. Curriculum mapping, in brief, seeks to reveal and make explicit how LEP local curricula articulates with and meets the requirements of the various specialty national curricula.

More specifically, at KSS Deanery curriculum mapping works on three levels. It is about making explicit curricula links between the local, LEP level curriculum and national, Royal College approved curricula, mediated through the work of the regional Specialty Schools. At national level, Royal Colleges produce a national curriculum framework which sets out the broad boundaries and expectations of teaching and learning in their specialty. At local level, specialty trainees experience a personal curriculum arising from complex real-life clinical practice, which their teachers and LFG have managed and organized into a relatively predictable local curriculum in practice, matching, to varying degrees, the national curriculum frameworks. At regionallevel, between the Royal College’s national curriculum framework and the LEP’s local curriculum in practice, stands the KSS Deanery Specialty School, charged with ensuring two things: that there is good comparability and coherence between LEP curricula across the region; and that, taken together, the LEP curricula reflect appropriately the intentions of the relevant Royal College’s national curriculum framework. This is diagrammatically expressed below.

The process of curriculum mapping begins first by identifying the different elements of the curriculum at LEP level. Second, the process reveals how these LEP elements match national specialty curricula requirements. Third, it determines what action is required at regional level, by the Specialty School, to ensure best fit between LEP curricula and the relevant Royal College national curriculum framework, for example, in terms of rotations, comparability of standards, and meeting the individual, personal needs of learners. The mapping process interrogates:

• curriculum as explicitly set out in posts and rotations;
• the actual experience of trainees; e.g. evidenced through trainee feedback to LFGs; records of trainee attendance at formal teaching; trainee progression and completion rates and assessment;
• case studies (e.g. log books; portfolios);
• teaching programmes at LEP, regional level and university level mapped against to national curricula;  
• new approaches to learning e.g. the Clinic Project in Medicine; the Learning Agreement in ACCS.   

In due course the work of the curriculum mapping project will be reported on the KSS Deanery website