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The 30-month FMEC project, spearheaded by AFMC, examined how Canadian medical doctor education programs can best respond to society’s evolving needs, and their alignment with AFMC’s social accountability mission for medical schools. The report contains 10 recommendations for medical schools that address admissions processes, where and how students are taught and evaluated, increasing the number of generalists (including family physicians) and training physicians in inter-professional teams, among others.The goal is to change medical education to optimize healthcare delivery and improve health status for all Canadians.

Dr. William Albritton, dean of the College of Medicine, envisions the recommendations will enhance work that is currently underway, specifically focusing on addressing individual and community needs, diversifying learning contexts, valuing generalism and advancing inter- and intra- professional practice.

“For us, these recommendations strengthen the vision we have for serving the people of Saskatchewan,” said Albritton. “The province clearly outlined the need for health care providers to more fully address individual and community needs. We know Saskatchewan must also increase its number of primary care physicians and recruit and retain these skilled professionals in communities throughout the province. Additionally, the recommendation to diversify learning contexts for students meshes perfectly with the college’s vision for a distributed model of medical education where learners are placed in communities throughout Saskatchewan as an integral part of their training. The Academic Health Sciences complex currently being constructed on the U of S campus will be the flagship environment for inter- and intra- professional medical training.”

According to AFMC, improving Canadian MD education programs by implementing these recommendations will not only enhance the quality of education in Canadian medical schools but also better equip Canada’s physicians and health care systems to respond and adapt to the changing health and societal needs that define this nation. The FMEC Collective vision is both a prescription and a platform for change.

The U of S is a member of AFMC, an organization that represents Canada’s 17 faculties of medicine and is the national voice for academic medicine through promotion of medical education, research, and clinical care.

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For more information, contact:
Laura Herman, Communications
College of Medicine
University of Saskatchewan
Tel: (306) 966-6059 Cell: (306) 262-6059
Email: laura.herman@usask.ca

Background Information:

The 30-month FMEC project set out to conduct a comprehensive review of MD education in Canada, assess current and future societal needs, and identify the changes needed to better align the two. The 10 recommendations and five enabling recommendations that comprise this collective vision present an integrated national framework for change for Canadian MD education into the 21st century.

The 10 FMEC recommendations for MD education (also known as undergraduate medical education) are grounded in evidence and emerge from a broad and rigorous consultative process. They are as follows:

Recommendation I: Individual and Community Needs
Social responsibility and accountability are core values underpinning the roles of Canadian physicians and faculties of medicine. This commitment means that both individually and collectively, physicians and faculties must work to respond to the diverse needs of individuals and communities throughout Canada, as well as meeting international responsibilities to the global community.

Recommendation II: Admissions Processes
Given the broad range of attitudes, values and skills required of physicians, faculties of medicine must enhance admissions processes to include assessment of key values and personal characteristics of future physicians such as communication, interpersonal and collaborative skills, a range of professional interests, as well as cognitive ability. Additionally, in order to achieve the desired diversity in our physician workforce, faculties of medicine must recruit, select and support a representative mix of medical students.

Recommendation III: Scientific Basis of Medicine
Given that medicine is rooted in fundamental scientific principles, both human and biological sciences must be learned in relevant and immediate clinical contexts throughout the MD education experience. In addition, as scientific inquiry provides the basis for advancing healthcare, research interests and skills must be developed to foster a new generation of health researchers.

Recommendation IV: Prevention & Public Health
Promoting a healthy Canadian population requires a multifaceted approach engaging the full continuum of health and healthcare. Faculties of medicine have a critical role to play in enabling this requirement and must therefore enhance the integration of prevention and public health competencies to a greater extent in the MD education curriculum.

Recommendation V: The Hidden Curriculum
The hidden curriculum is a “set of influences that function at the level of organizational structure and culture,” affecting the nature of learning, professional interactions and clinical practice. Faculties of medicine must therefore ensure that the hidden curriculum is regularly identified and addressed by students, educators and faculty throughout all stages of learning.

Recommendation VI: Learning Context
Canadian physicians practise in a wide range of institutional and community settings while providing the continuum of medical care. In order to prepare physicians for these realities, faculties of medicine must provide learning experiences throughout MD education for all students in a variety of settings ranging from small rural communities to complex tertiary health care centres.

Recommendation VII: Valuing Generalism
Recognizing that generalism is foundational for all physicians, MD education must be focused on broadly based generalist content, including comprehensive family medicine. Moreover, family physicians and other generalists must be integral participants in all stages of MD education.

Recommendation VIII: Inter- and Intra-professional Practice
To improve collaborative, patient-centred care, MD education must reflect ongoing changes in scopes of practice and healthcare delivery. Faculties of medicine must equip MD education learners with the competencies that will enable them to function effectively as part of inter- and intra-professional teams.

Recommendation IX: Toward a Competency-Based Approach
To prepare for lifelong learning—putting the continuum of medical education into practice — MD education must be based primarily on the development of core foundational competencies and complementary broad experiential learning. In addition to pre-defined curriculum requirements, MD education must also provide flexible opportunities for students to pursue individual scholarly interests in medicine.

Recommendation X: Fostering Medical Leadership
Medical leadership is essential in regard to both patient care and the overall health system. Faculties of medicine must foster medical leadership for both faculty and students, including how to manage, navigate, and help transform medical practice and the health system in collaboration with others.

They are accompanied by five enabling recommendations that will facilitate the implementation of the FMEC recommendations:

Enabling Recommendation I: Accreditation Standards
Recognizing that accreditation is a powerful lever, Canadian medical leaders must review and realign existing CACMS standards and develop new ones, as necessary, to respond to the recommendations in this report. This may involve the alignment of undergraduate and postgraduate accreditation standards.

Enabling Recommendation II: Building Capacity for Change
Each faculty of medicine should carry out a review of its organizational systems, processes, and structures to determine and build capacity where required to support a constructive response to these recommendations.

Enabling Recommendation III: Increased National Collaboration
Canadian faculties of medicine are continually innovating and have much to offer each other. Increased collaboration among schools, including sharing of teaching resources, evaluation frameworks, tools for common curriculum development and innovation, as well as learning resources and information technology, is desirable.

Enabling Recommendation IV: Technology
Based on rapid and evolving technology changes in how people communicate and learn, there must be increased understanding and use of technology on the part of both faculty and learners at all MD education sites.

Enabling Recommendation V: Faculty Development
Recognizing that teaching, research and leadership are core roles for physicians, faculty development in these areas must be a high priority to enable teachers and learners to respond effectively to the recommendations in this report.