“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success.” Henry Ford (1863–1947).
From a medical perspective, European countries are growing closer together. An increasing number of physicians are crossing borders and swapping workplaces. In order to facilitate this development, the European Union (EU) adopted a directive dictating the equality of diplomas and medical board certificates within the EU [1]. Despite a number of initiatives, such as the “Lifelong Learning Programme: education and training opportunities”, for which the ERASMUS (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) is a sub-programme aimed at harmonising medical education during the early phases of medical training [2], there is a need to standardise knowledge and skills at later career stages in order to guarantee and harmonise the quality of patient care in Europe.
To address this, the HERMES project (Harmonised Education in Respiratory Medicine for European Specialists) was launched by the European Respiratory Society (ERS) in 2005 in order to harmonise education and training in respiratory medicine. With the success of this project, the ERS extended its scope to include a Paediatric Respiratory Medicine HERMES and subspecialty-focused HERMES projects. Thus, the Respiratory Critical Care HERMES project was launched in 2009. The project aims to provide educational standards and a training framework for respiratory critical care medicine using standardised modified Delphi surveys, facilitated group discussions and plenary sessions.
This is consistent with the ERS mission and has the ultimate goal of providing better patient care.
Similar projects in critical care have been launched in the past, such as the multi-society task force on competencies in pulmonary and critical care medicine reported by Buckley et al. [3] in 2009 and the development of core competencies for an international training programme in intensive care medicine as outlined by Bion and Barrett [4] in 2006. Our aim, however, was to focus on respiratory critical care medicine and, compared to our American task force counterparts, we face the challenge of harmonising an educational programme in a multitude of countries with major differences in respiratory critical care training and certification standards.
Publication information
Artigas A, Pelosi P, Dellweg D, Brochard L, Ferrer M, Geiseler J, Larsson A, Nava S, Navalesi P, Noel J-L, Orfanos S, Palange P, Schoenhofer B, Vassilakopoulos T, Simonds A 2012, Respiratory critical care HERMES syllabus: defining competencies for respiratory doctors, European Respiratory Journal, Vol:39, ISSN:0903-1936, Pages:1294-1297.