Report of the Third Conference on Education in Clinical Chemistry.

The Third Conference on Education in Clinical Chemistry was organized by the Board of Directors of the Commission on Accreditation in Clinical Chemistry (COMACC) and was held at the Sheraton Gateway Suites, O’Hare Airport in Chicago, IL, on September 29–October 1, 1995. The two previous conferences had been held in Columbus, OH, in 1973 [1] and Chicago, IL, in 1975 [2]; the 1975 conference had 75 attendees representing 50 institutions. The Third Conference was cosponsored by the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC), the American Board of Clinical Chemistry (ABCC), and the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry. Directors of postdoctoral training programs from each COMACCaccredited program were invited to attend, as were Jay McDonald, University of Alabama at Birmingham, who provided the keynote address, and guest speakers representing clinical chemistry opportunities within industry. A total of 30 program directors and guest speakers were present, representing all but 2 of the 19 postdoctoral programs accredited by COMACC at the time. A current listing of COMACC-approved graduate and postdoctoral programs in clinical chemistry is included in Table 1. This conference was organized in response to new educational needs brought about by dramatic changes in the delivery of laboratory medicine. Many groups have documented this reform. In 1995, the AACC Board of Directors formed a Task Force to examine the current practice environment, estimate future practices, list professional qualifications necessary to meet anticipated practices, and recommend programs to enable clinical chemists to gain the required competencies [3]. As listed by the Task Force, the skills needed today are in the areas of clinical (for test logic, appropriateness, and consultation), scientific and technical (in automation, informatics, and robotics), and management (for multidisciplinary team-building and leadership). A new task force (Delta) has been created and its members are now meeting to address specific means by which core competencies can be achieved. Almost simultaneously, a second group of clinical chemists, naming themselves the Athena Society, met in Rhodes, Greece, in September 1995, and Fullerton, CA, in July 1996. While they came to the same general conclusions as the AACC Task Force, they listed specialty areas where the core competencies were needed [4]. The Athena Society stressed the need for reform in basic training programs for students and the establishment of programs for the retraining of practicing clinical chemists. Because COMACC is responsible for accrediting clinical chemistry training programs in the US, the Third Conference on Education was convened to discuss how the existing curriculum of postdoctoral clinical chemistry training programs could be expanded to meet the changing practice environment and to make graduates of accredited programs more competitive for employment opportunities within the field. (A similar multiorganization effort was recently conducted for modification of clinical pathology residency training programs [5].)