Establishing Consensus on Needs, Competencies, and Learning Goals for a Curriculum in Health Technology Assessment

The decision to fund new medication, procedure, or test, involves evaluation of their intended and unintended effects, cost, and social, ethical and legal implications. The process of evaluation is called health technology assessment (HTA). Limited training opportunities is a recognized challenge for HTA in Canada: the CEO of the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health characterizes recruitment of HTA specialists as a "war for talent". We propose to address this gap by convening a group of patients, lay person citizens, HTA experts, and decision-makers from the public and private sectors to conduct a needs assessment, establish competencies, formulate learning goals, and design a curriculum for training in HTA. Using best practices in adult education, we collectively will characterize the competencies, list corresponding learning objectives, and outline educational experiences to achieve the objectives. The expected contributions of the meeting include: a consensus of needs, core competencies, and learning objectives for junior and senior analysts in public health sector in Canada.