Introduction: Continuing Medical Education (CME) significantly improves the competency of healthcare workers in Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) clinics. However, CME courses are very costly, and a few participants fully attended a course. Online training is an alternative approach to efficiently improve training outcomes. The study assessed needs and possibility of online training courses of MMT clinics in southern Vietnam.

Methods: A google form was designed to collect characteristics, man-powers, facilities, online activities and training needs of MMT clinics. E-mails were sent to all MMT clinics in southern Vietnam to ask for their participants. A representative of MMT clinics who satisfied the inclusion invited to complete the form.

Result: 93 MMT clinics completed the survey. The response rate was 62% (93/150). One MMT clinic had 3 doctors/assistant doctors, 3 pharmacists/drug dispensers, 2 consultants and 3 other professionals on average. The number of clients visiting the clinic in the last month was 150. About 94% (93/95) of MMT clinics provide other additional services. On average, 385 clients came to MMT for other services. All clinics had adequate devices for online and blended training.

Conclusion: MMT clinics had high training needs and were willing to attend online and blended training courses. Online and blended training were possible in MMT clinics.

The paper aimed to present the introduction of the first official medical physics training program - a new health care profession in Vietnam. The detail studies and analyses of the current status of training in Medical Physics as well as the present and future demands of it were also reported. The main roles, responsibilities and the challenges of medical physicists in medicine were discussed and clarified as well.

A POSCE was developed and administered in 2015 to assess six professional attributes for the Family Medicine (FM) residents, University of Medicine and Pharmacy (UMP), Vietnam. This study aims at exploring inter-rater reliability in FM POSCE developed in this context when analytic rubrics were applied.

Background: Past POSCEs showed raters’ variability on applying the global marking items and holistic rating. Using analytic rubrics, unlike holistic type, will provide more rationale for assigning a certain score might influence raters’ variability. Nonetheless, it is little known to what extent switching to this rubric type might influence the inter-rater reliability of POSCE.  

Methods:  Before the FM professionalism module (pretest) and after this module (posttest), 36 and 42 FM residents took the POSCE respectively. The raters in the pretest included 12 teachers of FM training center. Four faculty members from different faculties were belatedly added to the post-test together with the 12 former raters.  Raters’ training occurred in two different times, the former took place only for the 12 FM raters before the pretest and the latter was before the posttest for the 4 belatedly-recruited. During the POSCE, one pair of raters observed all performances per station. Inter-rater reliability was measured by the differences in total scores between raters per pair using paired t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient.  

Results: In POSCE pretest, no significant difference was found between raters’ scores in most pairs of raters, contrasting with that in the posttest. Most differences were noticed in the pairs of raters, in which one of the raters was the belatedly-recruited. In the pretest, moderate to strong positive correlation between raters’ mean scores were found (r=0.55-0.85), similar range was seen in the post-test (r=0.47-0.87), however, the correlation slightly weakened.   

Discussion and conclusion: The FM POSCE has high inter-rater reliability on the utilization of analytic grading rubrics. An analytic rubric might help minimize the discrepancies among raters. Moreover, training raters might have been an alternative influential factor on the raters’ consensus.