Chair's Message
Welcome to 2023 and Happy New Year to everyone.
In my last newsletter, I looked back on the year that 2022 was. This month, I want to look forward and highlight some of the things on the horizon that are coming our way.
As we move into February, we have the usual business and excitement of CaRMS including interviews with medical students and “the match.” For Schulich, we are coming off a match in 2022 that saw more than 50 per cent of our undergraduate students match to a Family Medicine residency and I am hoping this trend will continue in 2023. Our Department continues to assist in the promotion of Family Medicine as a career choice with the launch of the Longitudinal Clinical Experience for Meds 2026 (the current 1st year class). Meds 2025 and 2024 have already completed this new experiential learning opportunity to witness first hand the breadth, depth, and richness that being a family physician brings.
Within the postgraduate portfolio, some of the details around expansion are starting to come into focus. Last March, the Government of Ontario announced an expansion of medical school education (https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1001773/ontario-training-more-doctors-as-it-builds-a-more-resilient-health-care-system) that will see more Family Medicine residency spots within our program at Western. This is an exciting opportunity to expand current, and create new, training sites across our region. Our hope is that providing more training opportunities to residents within our region will encourage more of them to stay in the area and be the start to reversing the shortage of family physicians we are currently experiencing.
Also, within postgraduate education, we are learning more about the CFPC’s plan to revamp the education and training experience of our residents. Originally announced a year ago (https://www.cfpc.ca/en/news/preparing-our-future-family-physicians), Departments of Family Medicine across the country have officially launched work on the “Outcomes of Training Project” with an aim to have a revised and more comprehensive training program for residents launched by some schools and training sites in 2027. I look forward to bringing you updates on this work over the next months to years, as our team works hard to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive curriculum to our resident learners.
Perhaps the item I am most excited about right now, is the pending release of the Department of Family Medicine’s new strategic plan. Starting last October, Department members have been contributing to developing a new mission, vision, and strategic objectives to carry us with “passion and purpose” for the next five years. As we are nearing completion of the work, I am looking for a broad range of stakeholders to provide an opinion on the work to date. Is it hitting the mark? What might we be missing? If you are an adjunct faculty, resident, medical student, or anyone who would like to provide some feedback on our draft strategy map, I encourage you to contact me (smckay28@uwo.ca) so I can share our plan with you, as well as a short survey to know your thoughts. Your input is so very valuable to our process to ensuring we have a plan that provides a complete picture of where we want to head as a Department.
As always, thank you for all the hard work and dedication you show to our shared clinical and educational work. If you have feedback our suggestions for topics for the chair’s message, let me know at smckay28@uwo.ca or @FMChairChief on twitter.
