Jill Waalen, MD, MPH, FACPM
ACPM President
It’s Back-to-School — time that bittersweet season of transitions, when we look forward to the return to school-year routines. And for Preventive Medicine trainees, one of the seasonal milestones is preparing for the Board Certification Examination.
ACPM has always been invested in assuring the success of trainees in the pursuit of certification, most directly through the Board Review Course and the In-Service Examination. While enduring over decades, these offerings have also been undergoing some notable changes of late.
The ACPM Board Review Course has been updated, few notes about the current course:
- ACPM offers the most comprehensive, course-based resource available, specifically aligned with the ABPM Certification Exam content outline for each Preventive Medicine specialty (Public Health/General Preventive Medicine; Occupational and Environmental Medicine; and Aerospace Medicine).
- The course bundle lectures from 18 leading experts in their respective fields, representing USPSTF members, academic leaders and prevention/public health practitioners, providing 23.75 hours of core material and 33.5 hours across the three specialties, all of which are available for CME credits.
- New topics are regularly added to stay current with the most recent ABPM exam content outlines, including Lifestyle Medicine, Social Determinants of Health and Global Health.
- This year’s version welcomes a new lecturer for the Infectious Disease section, Dr. Dennis Faix, providing world-class expertise from his roles as an Infectious Disease physician for the US Navy, including at the Naval Health Research Center and the World Health Organization.
The In-Service examination, also a constant in the Preventive Medicine trainee experience, has also been undergoing major changes over the past 2 years, with an increased focus on specialty questions.
This parallels the move by ABPM in 2024 to change the Certification exam format from 2 exams of 150 questions each –one covering Core, one covering Specialty—to one exam for each specialty–containing 150 questions for that specialty and 50 questions on core material.
Corresponding changes to the In-Service Exam include:
- Addition of Specialty questions, with the goal of matching the question distribution of the ABPM Certification examination (75% specialty/25% core) in the next few years.
- Ongoing expansion of specialty question banks for each Specialty through 10 monthly item writer workshops held throughout the year for each specialty. We are grateful for the expert input from all the specialties, including 15 item writers for PH/GPM; 10 for OEM; and 6 for ASM this year.
- Ongoing quality improvement of questions through the iterative process of evaluating item performance with formal psychometrics and aligning topic coverage based on ACPM content outlines.
We also keep hearing requests for more Board Review resources. Future efforts will include enhancing the Board Review format to optimize delivery of content for adult learners and align with best practices in Board exam preparation.
And we’re steadily building a large question bank, with the ultimate goal of making retired questions available as an additional Board preparation resource.
In the meantime, ACPM remains invested in the success of our trainees in securing Certification and we will keep working on your behalf. And Happy Back-to-School!
