Gateways guidance: 5.4 Competence standards

Competence standards apply to all parts of the course, including entry. These set out the academic, medical, or other standards applied by or on behalf of an education provider for the purpose of determining whether or not a person has a particular level of competence or ability. Competence standards must be reviewed from a disability discrimination perspective and must describe relevant and genuine competences that are strictly necessary for course completion.

Competence standards are, effectively, entry and assessment criteria. Reasonable adjustments do not have to be made to competence standards, but they do have to be made to the way that the standards are assessed or performed. It is important, particularly in examinations, to recognise that disabled doctors sometimes use different clinical methods to detect abnormality. So, for example, students with hearing loss may have to experiment with different combinations of electronic stethoscope and hearing aids until the process works effectively for them. Further, being able to answer a crash call summoning a resuscitation team to an emergency might not constitute a genuine competence standard, if reasonable adjustments could be made to the working environment or tasks so that answering such calls was not a necessary task for a particular team member. 

Given the variety of curriculum types in the United Kingdom, competence standards can vary slightly from school to school but the curricula will be referenced to Tomorrow’s Doctors.