Chair's Message – Focus on Strategic Priorities
This month is the beginning of a new year and a new decade. What is in store for the Department of Family Medicine over the next five to 10 years? Things seem to be changing very quickly in primary care, and how does our department adapt to change and continue to thrive?
I will use the next few Chair’s messages to focus on the strategic priorities established in our strategic plan of 2018 and indicate how these guidelines will keep us moving ahead.
Strategic Priority in Clinical Care: Dedication to comprehensive family medicine through collaboration with other health professionals: This priority guides us in team-based care with a continued effort to provide comprehensive services for our patients. Patients are already benefiting from a wider range of services available through their primary care team.
Strategic Priority in Education: Provide the best learner experience across all levels of learning, undergraduate, postgraduate and graduate. The actions under this priority encourage us to use innovative teaching methods, responsive to learner feedback, and provide the learner experiences that showcase comprehensive family medicine. The introduction of the Longitudinal Clinical Experience is an example of an innovation that will meet this goal.
Strategic Priority in Research, Quality Improvement, and Scholarly Activities: Promote collaboration in research, quality improvement, and scholarly activities. The actions under this priority encourage us to collaborate widely but especially with colleagues close to us in Epidemiology and Public Health, and to bring clinical faculty members, including our community-based colleagues, and basic scientists together in research collaborations and innovations. Efforts directed towards making the WCPHFM a hub for research and education and establishing a PBRN are already showing promise towards this strategic goal. Our research coordinator is helping to engage more clinical faculty members with research projects.
More to come in future Chair’s messages. As always I welcome your feedback at swetmore@uwo.ca or Twitter @DOCSJW.
