Test 2

We were established the same year Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

Okay, that was a tricky one. It actually wasn’t until June 1929 (a year later) that a special act of Parliament formed the Royal College to oversee postgraduate medical education.

We accredit the university programs that train resident physicians for their specialty practices.

We used to offer just two specialty qualifications: Fellowship in general medicine and Fellowship in general surgery.

Dr. Françoise Chagnon, an otolaryngologist based in Montreal and our current President-Elect, will be the Royal College’s first woman President.

We write and administer exams that residents must pass to become certified as specialists (with a lot of help from our incredible volunteers!)

Okay, that was an easy one! A common misperception is that we also license physicians – the mandate of the provincial and territorial colleges, with whom we work closely.

Years ago, certified specialists who wanted to become Royal College Fellows had to write and pass a second set of Fellowship exams.

This lasted from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1972, we abolished this dual standard and began to offer a single certification. Given the choice, would you have written two sets of exams?

We have resident input on our Council decisions.

Our Maintenance of Certification Program helps ensure specialists stay up-to-date with their learning. It was piloted in 1999, one year before it was launched as a Fellowship requirement.

In fact, our pilot began five years before launch, way back in 1995, as a voluntary program to log continuing medical education activities and ongoing learning. It is now a core component of Royal College Fellowship and of the profession’s self-regulation.

While the word “innovation” isn’t always associated with the Royal College, we were an early investor in simulation as a means of training health care professionals and keeping skills up-to-date.

The CanMEDS 2015 project that refreshed our well-known physician competency framework marked the first time the framework was updated since it was adopted in 1996.

The goal of Competence by Design (which will introduce a competency-based approach to postgraduate medical education) is to make training time free and progress purely on the basis of attaining training milestones.

Our advocacy and research efforts focus exclusively on specialist physician employment.

While that work arguably generated the broadest interest and attention, our policy and research work also relates to medical education and other aspects of the health system (for example, Indigenous health, patient safety, etc.).

Our vision statement is “The best health and care for all Canadians.”

It’s close, but it’s actually “The best health for all. The best care for all.” While we work predominantly with partners in Canada; via Royal College International, we help influence global health systems. We do this by sharing knowledge through products and services like CanMEDS, program and institutional reviews, accreditation services, workshops and courses. We now have formal working arrangements with 15+ institutions abroad. We also contribute on a humanitarian basis to efforts in Haiti, Nepal, Sudan and Senegal.