SAEM's Emergency Medicine Milestones

The SAEM released its educational milestones on their website this week; these are a comprehensive set of skills that every emergency physician should possess by the time they graduate residency.  The resident's level of competence for each skill is graded on a 5 point scale.

The significance of the publication of these milestones is great.  I have often advocated to reevaluate the arbitrary means of granting graduation in medical education.  Just because you got through 3 or 4 years of residency, does not mean that you deserve to graduate residency (the same goes for medical school).  To be elevated from one level to the next, you should be required to prove that you have hit the necessary milestones to move on to the next level.  The recently published milestones can help make that a reality, and introduce a better system to ensure our patients that the physicians who take care of them are truely competent.  The ridiculousness of standardized paper board exams may be done away with or at least deprioritized.