Progress report for
Shared Canadian Curriculum in Family Medicine
Achievement at a glance
Now known as LearnFM, the Shared Canadian Curriculum in Family Medicine offers through its website, learnfm.ca, a wide variety of open-access family medicine educational resources. These include: consensus on key topics in family medicine for medical students, evidence-based and peer-reviewed and point-of-care tools to support clinical learning, curated background resources.<br>
<br>Launched in October, 2018, is our open-access formative micro-case exam bank. Using e-learning technology created at the University of Calgary, this platform presents learners with brief patient scenarios to help them with developing their clinical reasoning skills. Learners are given feedback on their answers to the question. Importantly, the system can re-send cases to the learner that they got wrong initially, with the background coding randomizing elements so the patient case presented looks different. (For example, in a case about a coughing patient who actually has pneumonia, the first time it might be a 4 year old girl accompanied by her father; the second time it might be a 3 year old boy accompanied by his mother. However, the key physical finding of elevated respiratory rate would be clearly elevated in both instances.)
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<br>This is a new and valuable resource. A key challenge for educators is having to write questions over and over again. This system lifts that burden as students can't simply memorize the scenarios, as they look different each time.
Challenges faced in implementation
We encountered an unexpected corruption of some of our files for the point-of-care Clinical Cards, which has delayed the development and on-line publication of our 2019 set. We anticipate that these will be on-line by March 2019.Beneficiaries
1. Individual learners world wide are beneficiaries as they now have access to open-access educational resources to support their learning in family medicine.
<br>2. Family medicine educators are beneficiaries as they can access our resources to supplement their own curricular materials.
<br>3. Hopefully patients will benefit from the evidence-based care they receive as a result of our curricular materials, and from having a well-educated cohort of physicians caring for them.