ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the current landscape of objectives and competencies in international medical electives (IMEs), including examples from specific organisations, as well as best practices from the literature. A recent study exploring competencies for IMEs found that the majority of attention was paid to the intra-elective objectives, that is, the objectives framing the time that students spend away from their home institution. A number of studies have explored the current approaches to global health objectives and competencies in the medical education literature. Taken together, these studies demonstrate a growing trend towards programmes displaying the objectives and competencies of IMEs in publications, but also reveal variability between institutions developing competencies for their specific IMEs. In general, voices from high-income countries (HICs) have outnumbered perspectives from low and middle-income country (LMIC) in the published literature on objectives and competencies for IMEs.
