December 12, 2011
Dear Residents and Faculty,
There are now only two more weeks left in this current rotation. This is a reminder that it is critical for all supervisors of residents to complete their appropriate ITER on the POWER system. We have set Friday December 16th as the ITER Completion Day. Please note that the timeliness of supervisor ITER completion is a Standard of Accreditation and an explicit component of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine Code of Conduct. As Program Director, I will be closely monitoring timeliness of ITER completion as one facet of teaching performance and will be addressing this during faculty promotion meetings. Residents in our Department deserve to receive timely feedback about their performance.
Residents are advised to confirm that all supervisors have been linked on POWER. If this has not yet happened, your local Education Site Coordinator can facilitate this, as can Julia Bella (julia.bella@utoronto.ca) and Vanni Sharma (vanni.sharma@utoronto.ca).
If you are a primary supervisor of a clinical rotation, please ensure that you solicit feedback from all the relevant staff who have worked with your resident these past 3-6 months. Given the importance of inter-professional functioning in contemporary medical practice, please also ensure that at least one of the evaluating staff contributing to this ITER is a non-psychiatrist and ideally a non-physician who can accurately comment on the resident’s performance in the Manager, Collaborator and Professional roles. Please enter the name(s) of these individuals in the narrative section at the end of the ITER. Please also ensure that your meeting with your resident supervisee is face-to-face and ensure that you provide detailed and very specific feedback about the resident’s performance. Ask the resident to first self-assess their performance and then provide the resident with verbal feeback and let them know their scores in the pertinent CanMEDS roles. Please note that there are new psychotherapy modality ITERs that must be completed by psychotherapy supervisors on POWER. However, the primary supervisor should still evaluate the resident’s general supportive psychotherapy skills that are manifested during the actual core rotation.
There is now a specific ITER for all PGY-2 residents who follow patients suffering from severe and persistent mental illness. All senior clinical selectives will utilize a generic (General Psychiatry) ITER. Research elective blocks of 3-12 months must utilize the research ITER.
All supervisors are expected to complete their evaluations on POWER by December 16th 2011. Please note that a special alert function has now been programmed on POWER to identify supervisors with late ITER completion (occurring later than 2 weeks after the end of the July-December 2011 rotation). Supervisor Evaluation Forms on POWER also specifically ask residents whether their ITERs were completed by the end of the rotation.
Thank you in advance for your attention and cooperation on this important educational activity.
Sincerely,
Ari Zaretsky MD FRCPC
Director, Postgraduate Education and Associate Professor
Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
Head, Mood Disorders Clinic and Director, Medical Education,
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health