Join our Big Ideas Working Groups in Education Scholarship at DFCM

DFCM Faculty are invited to join us in guiding the development of future areas of focus for education scholarship at the DFCM.  The Office of Education Scholarship has identified three Big Ideas, or pillars, on which to focus our scholarly activity:

• Person-Centred Care
• Big Data
• The Specialist Generalist in Family Medicine

On May 30th, we are inviting all DFCM faculty to participate in discussions about these pillars and the scholarship that might arise from them. We are looking forward to dynamic conversations with faculty members bringing a diverse range of ideas, interests, experience and expertise.

Please join in and contribute to these important discussions 

Register Here

Agenda: 

Big Ideas Working Groups, May 30th, 500 University Ave., Room 365/303

(Faculty are invited to attend any or all of the sessions. All sessions will be webcast.)

• 10:00-12:00 – Person-Centred Care (facilitated by Drs. Cynthia Whitehead and Sarah Wright)
• 12:00-1:00 – lunch will be provided
• 1:00-3:00 – Big Data (facilitated by Dr. Mahan Kulasegaram)
• 3:00-5:00 – The Specialist Generalist in Family Medicine (facilitated by Dr. Nicole Woods)

Descriptions

PERSON-CENTRED CARE is a term increasingly used across health professions education to describe a holistic approach to care that incorporates equity and diversity issues.  DFCM has a long history of clinical and education excellence in Person-Centred Care (PCC) which includes work with marginalized populations, working with families, and global heath. Recognizing, honouring and building upon the deep roots of this work in Family Medicine, and in order to align with education scholarship initiatives across health disciplines, the OES has identified PCC as one of the new “Big Idea” areas of scholarly focus.  This involves studying the ways in which current structures and systems work to limit (or facilitate) our ability to achieve goals of diversity and equity both during medical training and in the delivery of healthcare to society.  Areas of study might include diversity in medical school admissions, the effects of the hidden curriculum and equity in healthcare training and delivery.

BIG DATA: Our trainees generate a variety of data points which we collect and yet we only attend to a fraction of this data. Critically, we only use this fraction to describe their activities and rarely do we make the logical step to predict or prescribe their actions. Using the principles of Big Data and Learning Analytics can help us evaluate our programs, be nimble in responding to changing trends, and deliver on our societal mandate of training high quality family physicians. Capitalizing on this data requires us to link our educational and clinical databases across the spectrum of training in the DFCM.  Our intention is to work with this information and seek insights that can improve our programming as well as benefit our learners

THE SPECIALIST GENERALIST: Family physicians can be described as the “expert generalists” of the Canadian healthcare system. As the ultimate generalist, an expert in family medicine must at times be a quick and efficient solver of routine problems and at other times be a resourceful innovator in the face of complexity, novelty and ambiguity.  Working at the intersection of real world practice and theoretical research in expertise development and human cognition, this pillar aims to identify the knowledge base and activities central to the practice of generalism as a specialty and inform models of teaching and learning across the education continuum.