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:
- Identify the required data and methods components of this initiative by collaborating with NOSM University, who have an existing reporting database.
- Conduct an environmental scan of other faculties of medicine with similar programs through the AFMC Social Accountability Network.
- 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).
- 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.