Blueprinting and auditing a postgraduate medical education programme - Lessons from COVID-19

Introduction: Disruptions of the postgraduate (PG) teaching programmes by COVID-19 have encouraged a transition to virtual methods of content delivery. This provided an impetus to evaluate the coverage of key learning goals by a pre-existing PG didactic programme in an Obstetrics and Gynaecology Specialty Training Programme. We describe a three-phase audit methodology that was developed for this. Methods: We performed a retrospective audit of the PG programme conducted by the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at National University Hospital, Singapore between January and December 2019 utilising a ten-step Training Needs Analysis (TNA). Content of each session was reviewed and mapped against components of the 15 core Knowledge Areas (KA) of the Royal College of Obstetrics & Gynaecology membership (MRCOG) examination syllabus. Results: Out of 71 PG sessions, there was a 64.9% coverage of the MRCOG syllabus. Four out of the 15 KAs were inadequately covered, achieving less than 50% of knowledge requirements. More procedural KAs such as "Gynaecological Problems" and those related to labour were poorly (less than 30%) covered. Following the audit, these identified gaps were addressed with targeted strategies. Conclusion: Our audit demonstrated that our pre-pandemic PG programme poorly covered core educational objectives i.e. the MRCOG syllabus, and required a systematic realignment. The COVID-19 pandemic, while disruptive to our PG programme, created an opportunity to analyse our training needs and revamp our virtual PG programme.