The outbreak of SARS in 2003 urged the Ministry of Health and Welfare (the former Department of Health, Executive Yuan) of our country to initiate the PGY (post-graduate year) programs for implementation of general medicine training as a reform to residents’ clinician training in which each new first-year residents must have a period of 3 months of general medical training so as to amend the over emphasis on specialization or sub-specialization in national residency training system.

The first stage of reform, from 2003 to 2006, was to carry out 3-month general medicine training aiming as a pioneer program to form the consensus among the teaching hospitals.  At the second stage starting from 2006, the program was extended to 6 months, accompanied with refined training model, faculty development for training of qualified mentors and accreditation mechanism to monitor the implementation of PGY programs in teaching hospitals.

From 2011, the third stage of reform extended the general medicine training to one year, as an echo to the global trend to have residents in their first one or two years of training for general medicine practice so that they may cope with the challenges rising from the rapid changes of disease patterns in the world community and finally are well-prepared with the capability for independent practice in their future career.  In recent years, aiming for the development of “core capacity” for residents, the training program further built into the concept of patient-centered medicine, inter-professional practice, evidence-based medicine, medical quality improvement and patient safety, and medical informatics as the essential elements of training contents.

In 2013, a pilot training program was established as a transition from the current one-year general medicine training into the scheduled reform into two-year general medicine training to be implemented from 2019. Aside from the primitive general medicine training, this transitional programs provide PGY residents some other alternative programs, largely classified as internal medicine group, surgical group, pediatrics group and gynecology groups, subject to their own choices if they are already determined to enter into the related practice as their life-long career.