Gersten Jonker

Delivery and adoption of the ACTY   49 3 INTRODUCTION Graduation frommedical school is a significant step in the educational continuum from student to being a life-long learning professional [1, 2]. This transition is a well-known challenge. Students, graduates, and program directors have regularly identified gaps in medical graduates’ readiness to assume clinical responsibility in postgraduate training [3-8] and educators have advocated to optimize this readiness in better designs of the final year of medical school [4, 9-11]. In the Netherlands, undergraduate medical education consists of a three-year mainly theoretical Bachelor phase, and a three-year Master phase, largely devoted to clinical rotations [12]. Usually, Master years 1 and 2 comprise compulsory rotations in several disciplines, whereas year 3 comprises elective rotations. To facilitate the transition to postgraduate training, schools have started to redesign the final year to create so called “dedicated transitional years”(DTY). The DTY is a final year elective trackmeant to enable development of early residency-level competence in order to give graduates a head start in postgraduate training [13]. In a DTY, students grow towards the responsibilities of a resident, acquire early specialty-specific expertise, explore career options, and try to improve their chances on the job market [14]. Dutch medical schools piloted and introduced local interpretations of this concept, but little is known about how and to what extent a DTY produces impact on learning. In 2014, University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht and the Antonius hospital introduced a multidisciplinary transitional year dedicated to acute care (Acute Care Transitional Year, ACTY) in a collaboration of five specialties: anesthesiology, cardiology, emergency medicine, intensive care medicine, and respiratory medicine. The ACTY distinguishes itself from the regular transitional year by being a coherent thematic year. Coherence is provided by the selection of disciplines, monthly teaching sessions, personal mentoring, learning objectives framed as entrustable professional activities (EPAs) which transcend disciplines, and multimodal assessments of course objectives prior, during and after the ACTY (Table 1) [15]. The ACTY has been running since September 2015 and has been offered as a pilot program within the elective constraints of the new Utrecht undergraduate curriculum [16, 17], preceding the full development and implementation of this curriculum reform. This study aims to explore the experiences of students and faculty with this specific DTY. Understanding strengths of and challenges with the implementation of current design will help in the development and implementation of final year redesigns.