CRAJ Winter 2024

Winter 2024 (Volume 34, Number 4)

News from the Education Committee

By Beth Hazel, OLY, MDCM, FRCPC, MM

Members of the CRA Education Committee at the 2024 ASM. From left to right (top row): Steven Thomson, Nicole Johnson, Cristina Moran-Toro, Liane Heale, Marie Clements-Baker, Trudy Taylor, Elizabeth Hazel, and Megan Himmel; (bottom row): Claire LeBlanc, Raheem Kherani, Ahmad Zbib, Claire McGowan, and Lori Albert.

In 2024, the Canadian Rheumatology Association (CRA) Education Committee’s major focus has been on starting the process of restructuring in order to further enhance collaboration between committees. We are striving to ensure that the CRA educational offerings respond to our members’ needs, both perceived and unperceived, and provide educational opportunities in different formats and throughout the year. We are working on offering a full slate of educational events without redundancy in content. Our goal is to support educational initiatives that will help steer potential, trainee, and current members towards engagement with the CRA as their premier education resource.

Our first step has been to review resident programming. While the CRA offers a wide array of resident programs and events, this has historically been facilitated by three different groups, the Residents’ Pre-Course and National Rheumatology Resident’s Curriculum (NRRC) Program Committees and the National Written Rheumatology In-Training Exam (NWRITE) Sub-Committee. This year we have improved collaboration between the groups to better align goals and enhance the coordination of resident offerings, and have made some significant changes to programming including the following:

NWRITE exam is now administered online
Residents’ Pre-Course Day 1 will be moved to January 2025 (earlier scheduling)
National virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) will be moved to April 2025 (between written & oral exams)
Fall resident event will be a social event exclusively prior to Canada Night and the spring resident event has been discontinued

To assist with content planning, this year we have also sought feedback from program directors regarding their required training experiences. Going forward, we plan to amalgamate all resident programming groups into a single program committee (new name forthcoming) so that we may optimize content planning, scheduling and operational efficiencies to provide a comprehensive and cohesive curriculum.

Our other sub-committees have continued with exciting projects. The Undergraduate Sub-Committee is working on developing educational resources for rheumatology educators, medical students, and pediatrics/internal medicine residents. The Postgraduate Sub-Committee continues to review and populate residency training resources in our CRA portal. They are reaching their goals regarding the development of a national immunology curriculum, through a multidisciplinary national collaborative process. The Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Sub-Committee continues to be engaged in many internal and external accreditation requests and the CRA LEAdership Program (LEAP) welcomed a new cohort to the 2024-2026 program.

The Education Committee is proud to support medical education initiatives throughout the career of a rheumatologist. We are committed to answering our members’ educational needs and are looking at ways beyond the traditional needs assessment to better identify high yield education projects and offerings. Our goal is to support educational initiatives that will help steer potential, trainee, and current members towards engagement with the CRA, as their premier education resource.

Elizabeth M. Hazel, OLY, MDCM, FRCPC, MM
Chair, CRA Education Committee
Division Director, Rheumatology,
McGill University Health Centre
Assistant Dean, PGME, CBME
Associate Professor of Medicine,
Division of Rheumatology, McGill University
Montreal, Quebec