MUPPETS
UCEM Essential Roles and Core Competencies
In November 2024, the Utopian College of Emergency for Medicine redeveloped the CanMEDS Physician Competency Framework to better incorporate and more accurately define the evolving discipline of Utopian Medicine (sansBEDS).
UCEM trainees (Medical Utopians Perfecting the Practice of Emergency and Trauma Scenarios) aspire to develop the skills required to achieve Utopian Medical Enlightenment. There are five main roles, each with their own key competencies:
Medical Utopian (Expert)
- Function effectively as consultants, integrating all of the UCEM core competencies to deliver the Utopian dream of optimal, ethical and patient-centered medical care for all.
- Establish and maintain knowledge skills and attitudes appropriate to the continuance of your own health and sanity whilst practicing medicine.
- Perform a complete and appropriate examination of a patient without undoing more than 2 buttons of the patient’s clothing.
- Use preventative and therapeutic interventions to prevent armed insurrection in the ED by either staff or patients. (N.B. The Spetsnaz approach of aerosolized fentanyl is no longer recommended).
- Demonstrate extraordinary proficiency in the concurrent use of multiple procedural skills i.e. take a referring call, whilst reviewing an ECG and running a multi-trauma
- Obtain appropriate consultation from other health professionals by hook or by crook whether they like it or not, politely pointing out their possible complete lack of knowledge or expertise. After all, yesterday’s barely competent ED resident could be today’s surgical registrar and tomorrows medical administrator…
Babel fish (Communicator)
- Develop understanding and trust with patient and family. You are much less likely to get sued.
- Turn the rambling, mumbled, repetitive and highly variable rant delivered by patient and family into a comprehensible presentation.
- Explain a patient’s condition to them after they have been given multiple divergent diagnoses by their friends; their family, their GP; Google; yourself and the various specialties that don’t want to admit the patient.
- Carefully craft a follow up plan for your patient that neither involves immediate admission nor intensive, speculative or expensive investigations.
- Handball insidious cases to your colleagues ‘orally’ and ensure all ‘written’ notes are either hieroglyphically coded or decipherable only by Fellow UCEM’s
Collaborator
- Collaborate with other health care professionals to form an interdisciplinary team. Extra credit for extra curricular, one-on-one work with the most attractive health care professional you can lay your hands on (as long as they let you).
- Collaborate with other health care professionals to prevent and resolve interdisciplinary conflict (see brackets above).
- Remember – you could have got shot for this during the war but apparently, now it is a good thing.
Miracle Max (Manager)
- Create systems by which 5 times the number of patients are seen for half the money and only an “acceptable” increase in adverse events.
- Plot a career path through the ever shifting sands of government policy.
- Develop the ability to allocate 30 ill patients to the 5 available beds, fit square pegs in round holes and see around corners (Trolley Tetris Grand Master)
- Serve in management positions without finding the devil now has “first dibs” on your soul.
Eminence based professor
- Develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of bizarre, rare and mildly comic syndromes then use them to amuse, bemuse and confuse your peers
Educational Videos
- MUPPET training:
- The Surgical Referral
- The Medical Referral (with added slough)
- Utopian College principles