Supervisors:
Dr.Laura Muldoon, SIM anglophone and francophone leads, Assistant Professors 
and Dr. Sophie De Roock 

Background:
In the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, social medicine (SM) topics such as population health, public health, and health systems science are taught through the “Society, the Individual, and Medicine” (SIM) course. Students express dissatisfaction with the way some aspects of the SIM course are taught and assessed. (Student SIM focus group, May 12, 2022).  The current curriculum renewal process presents an opportunity to improve teaching in SM topics, with the goal of making the curriculum longitudinal, spiral, and integrated, and facilitating competency-based medical education through the integration of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs). As a component of the Phase 2 SIM-CSL working group, student Kathleen Qu performed a narrative review on best practices for teaching public health. Very little literature was available. In order to facilitate changes proposed by the SIM-CSL working group, more information is required on commonly used and innovative approaches to teaching SM in Canadian medical schools. We propose to conduct a pan-Canadian environmental scan of medical curricula for SM. This quality improvement project will help us to design changes to the teaching of SM at uOttawa.  

Methods:
With the assistance of Claire, Kendall, Associate Dean, Social Accountability, we will generate a list of SM leads at Canadian Medical Schools. We will approach the SM leads to participate in an interview about the methods their school uses to teach SM topics. We will require two students, one anglophone, one francophone. The students will conduct the interviews via zoom and record the findings. We will conduct an analysis of the findings under the following themes: 

1. Is the curriculum for the entire student population or elective for those with special interests? 

2. Format for delivering curriculum—lecture, small group, self-learning modules, workshops, fully integrated into clinical teaching, community service learning, others? 

3. How is the SM curriculum integrated with other components of medical school curriculum? 

4. Who is responsible? 

5. Any evaluations or research done on the impact of curricular methods? Program assessment? 

6. Are students satisfied?   

7. How are students assessed? MCQ exams, presentations, short answer written tests, essays, reflective writing (portfolio), other? 

8. How is SM integrated into EPAs and Competency-based education?  

9. What are the challenges of implementing the SM curriculum? 

Product: 
The students will produce a spreadsheet listing each medical school and the findings on the themes.   

Supervisors:
Dr. Claire Kendall, Associate Dean, Social Accountability 
Dr. Alan Chaput, Assistant Dean, Postgraduate Medical Education  

Background: 
A socially accountable medical school prepares learners to respond to current and future health needs and challenges in society. Medical schools (and the provinces that fund them) aim to fill gaps in the availability of care for underserved populations. They employ a variety of educational strategies to produce physicians who are not just technically but also socially and culturally capable of addressing the health and social needs of their reference populations. However, there is little understanding of how the medical curriculum influences the degree to graduates ultimately provide care to underserved populations. 

Most Canadian medical schools have developed admissions policies aimed at recruiting students with characteristics reflecting those of particular reference populations, such as students from rural and remote settings, and those from certain socioeconomic or ethnocultural backgrounds. However, in Canada, our work has shown that we know little about which physician characteristics there are associated with future choice of specialty, particularly for family medicine, or with future care for underserved populations. While some of our programs, such as Affaires francophone and the Indigenous Program aim to follow their learners after graduation, we have no formal process for evaluating the social reach of our MD and PGME programs. 

Objective: 
Our goal is to inform the development of a database that will collect and link existing and new data about our medical student and postgraduate trainees that will allow us to determine which factors are associated with their future practice patterns in terms of career choice, location of practice, and populations served, i.e., our social accountability impact. We are looking for a student to help us initiate this medical education, policy-oriented initiative. 

Methods: 
Specifically, the student will: 

1. Identify the required data and methods components of this initiative by collaborating with NOSM University, who have an existing reporting database. 

2. Conduct an environmental scan of other faculties of medicine with similar programs through the AFMC Social Accountability Network. 

3. Survey existing internal and external data sources that can populate these components (e.g., educational program data, administrative (e.g., admissions) data, medical licensing agencies data, physician registration data). 

4. Identify data collection tools required to collect additional longitudinal data from students and graduates, including existing tools from partners and literature review of surveys. 

The student will work with the Office of Social Accountability, attend weekly meetings, liaise with external and internal stakeholders. They will have the opportunity to present their work at relevant conferences.  

Supervisors:
Dr. Aleksandra Paliga, Undergraduate Medical Education Co-Directors for Pathology Section of pre-clerkship curriculum
Dr. Omar Al-Nourhji

Background:

70% of medical decisions are based on lab results, and yet the lab is poorly understood by most clinicians and this misunderstanding can lead to poor patient outcomes. Therefore, modernization of the laboratory medicine (aka pathology) component of the undergraduate curriculum is imperative. There are a few potential components to this project (depending on the interests/aptitude of the candidate):

1. Creating, filming, narrating, and editing a digital educational resource that will be incorporated into the medical school curriculum. Possible topics include outlining how a specimen is processed (i.e. the path a tissue fragment takes from the patient's body and how it is turned into a slide and a report that is then generated by a pathologist) and outlining indications and contra-indications for intraoperative frozen tissue consultations.
2. Renewing the pathology specific objectives in the pre-clerkship medical school curriculum to make them more case based and competency based.
3. Aligning pathology lectures, case-based learning sessions, simulation and e-learning labs with the newly created objectives (incorporating real pathology reports and patient scenarios, possibly adding scanned digital slides to relevant cased based learning sessions and labs, etc).

An ideal candidate for this position would be any medical student who is interested in helping to modernize the medical school curriculum and to educate the future generation of doctors. In particular students with an academic interest in medical education, oncology, surgery, laboratory medicine, or anyone who may be doing biopsies and receiving pathology reports in their future practice, would enjoy and benefit from working on this project. Additional experience with video recording, animation, and editing would be an asset although not required.

Supervisor:
Dr. Timothy J. Wood, Full professor in DIME and Director of Evaluation (UGME)

Background: 
An online formative exam for each Pre-clerkship unit was launched in the 2021/2022 academic year. The administration of the exams has proven to be feasible but the number of questions on each units’ exam is limited. In the summer of 2022, a student conducted a gap analysis of the learning objectives that were tested on each exam and those that were taught in the curriculum for each unit. Using that gap analysis, and working with assessment, Evaluation and Curriculum (AEC) staff, the student will contact content experts to provide questions in needed areas in order to increase the number of questions used on the exams. The student will also be expected to write questions in order to augment those units with the fewest questions. These questions will be shared with the respective content expert to ensure they are accurate.

Finally, the student will review all questions, both those provided by the content experts and those generated by the student to ensure proper formatting and that classification data are linked to each question. This classification data includes learning objectives, content categories and rationales for the correct answer. Once this information is filled in the questions will be translated and uploaded to the Elentra Exam Management System.

Students with experience as editors on the student led Q-bank will be preferred.

Key deliverables:

1. Review gap analysis and identify those units with a large number of missing objectives.
2. Together with AEC staff, contact content experts to provide questions.
3. Write questions to target missing gaps. It is expected that the student will write a minimum of 5 quality questions for each Preclerkship exam (10 exams)
4. Review all submitted questions to ensure they are well-structured and complete metadata associated with each question to allow for seamless integration in the Elentra platform.