Fit for the future? The place of global health in the UK's postgraduate medical training: a review

Hall, JA; Brown, CS; Pettigrew, L; Malik, ANJ; Watson, J; Topiwala, A; McGregor, L; Ramsay, R

There are a number of strengths and limitations to our study. First, all those reviewing the curricula have an interest in global health. This facilitated a shared understanding of what was meant by a global health competency and arguably helped with consistency across curriculum reviews. However, reviewers without a global health interest may have reached different conclusions. Secondly, the process of assignation of a competency to a category, though guided by the agreed definitions, is ultimately a subjective decision. While in some cases several people reviewed curricula, and in the FPH curriculum review good inter-rater reliability was achieved, 22 this was not possible for all curricula. To reduce inconsistency all assignations to the global health category were reviewed by JH and discussed with reviewers. As demonstrated in Table 3 , the global health competencies identified were very similar across the curricula indicating that this process was fairly successful. Finally, there were some discrepancies between the curricula in terms of exactly what 'a competency' was. Pragmatic decisions were taken where necessary and for this reason there are a number of caveats to the total number of competencies presented for each curriculum. These decisions were taken to increase the comparability of results between the curricula.