Academic Program Policy

Residents are required to attend all mandatory academic program events in order to successfully complete their residency training.  Attendance will be taken, recorded and monitored to ensure proper compliance.

Events can be:

• mandatory in person,
• virtual (via Zoom) or
• hybrid.

For mandatory in person events, residents must attend in person and sign the attendance sheet.

For events where Zoom is an option, residents must have their cameras on and attend 80% of the session in order to receive credit.

It is the resident’s responsibility to ensure they are scheduled to be off in-house call to attend academic program events.

All justified absences due to vacation, sick leave, personal leave, conference days or leaves pre-approved by the post graduate administration office will be excused.  

Residents who fail to attend any of the following mandatory academic events: family medicine academic half-days, ethics teaching sessions, behavioural medicine teaching sessions and palliative care teaching sessions will need to complete a self-directed learning exercise and submit it to the academic program director.  This includes those residents who attend via Zoom but stay for less than 80% of the session. The self-directed learning exercise will consist of a one page (single spaced, 12 font size) literature review of the academic topic that was not completed and attended by the resident.  A minimum of three different sources or articles should be included in the self-directed exercise.  Residents who fail to submit or complete this self-directed learning exercise will be notified and their academic faculty advisor will be contacted.  A formal notice will be forwarded to the Post-Graduate Executive Committee for review and consideration.

Residents who miss more than 3 sessions (unjustified absences) will automatically need to meet with the Academic Program and QI/Research Coordinator and the Postgraduate Director as this may lead to a remediation plan based on lack of professionalism.

Post-call and attendance at academic events:
It is the resident's responsibility to request time off for academic teaching with the individual rotation. Please check with the rotation to determine if there is rotation-specific scheduling software that residents must log into to request time off (Medicine and General Surgery each have their own software). If you requested time off for an academic teaching event but didn't receive it, please contact the Postgraduate Team.