Welcome to CanMEDS Interactive!

This new tool is designed to make it easy for you to implement CanMEDS 2015 and Competence by Design (CBD) CanMEDS is an educational framework first created by the Royal College in the 1990s. It describes the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve. The framework is organized into seven thematic groups of competencies, which are expressed as CanMEDS Roles.

New functionality allows you to use CanMEDS in a way that is meaningful to you and your program.

You can now:

  • Manipulate the framework and milestones to generate a fully customized and exportable file.
  • Sort through milestones easily to find what you need, when you need it.
  • Access practical tips and tools to teach and assess all seven CanMEDS Roles.
  • Download a copy of the CanMEDS 2015 Special OTR Addendum.

This is our first of many releases – come back often to see things like:

  • Speciality specific milestones (2016-17)
  • Increased ability to manipulate the Framework (2016)

The CanMEDS Roles

  • Medical Expert (the integrating role)
  • Communicator
  • Collaborator
  • Leader
  • Health Advocate
  • Scholar
  • Professional

While the CanMEDS Roles are clearly synergistic and interrelated, they are also unique. The CanMEDS Diagram is designed to illustrate how these unique roles fit together and describe the truly competent physician.

canmeds flower diagram saying professional communicator collaborator leader health advocate and scholar on the petals medical expert in the middle

CanMEDS: understanding its component parts

While each physician has a unique set of abilities, in everyday practice these competencies are integrated into a whole, and reflect their daily activities.

The aim of the Competence by Design (CBD) project is to improve the fundamental building blocks of Canadian medical training. Competence by Design is a move away from the practice of credentialing physicians solely on the basis of time spent on rotations and activities, and toward forms of learning and assessment that examine the learner's achievement and maintenance of competence in learning and practice.

  1. Key competencies: Within each of the seven Roles, there are a defined number of essential abilities known as key competencies.
  2. Enabling competencies: This term refers to the essential components of a key competency. Several enabling competencies in concert describe in greater detail the components of a key competency.
  3. CanMEDS Milestones: CanMEDS Milestones are educational statements that illustrate how a physician’s competence is expected to progress over the course of his/her career from novice to mastery. Milestones are associated with the CanMEDS enabling competencies and are typically expressed across six integrated stages of competence.