Quebec sees renewed focus on family medicine

With pressure from the Quebec government to produce an equal number of medical residents in family medicine and specialties by 2014-15, McGill University’s medical school — like many in the province — is moving toward creating a curriculum that will try to generate some excitement about a field that is sometimes viewed as less interesting and lucrative than medical specialties.

When McGill started working on a revision of its medical curriculum, only 17 per cent of its students were going into family medicine. Now it’s up to 37 per cent, similar to other big universities like the University of Toronto, but Quebec is increasing the number of residencies it makes available in family medicine and lowering that of specialties, so McGill has moved to meet the demand.

However, some physicians who are worried about the repercussions of the new curriculum seem to feel a push for family medicine is incompatible with the research excellence for which McGill is renown.

Not so, said McGill dean of medicine, Dr. David Eidelman.

“We already have quite excellent research in family medicine and McGill has Canada’s only graduate program in family medicine,” he said. “We’re still graduating a majority of specialists, but society doesn’t only need specialists.”

So McGill will be moving ahead with a revamped curriculum this fall that will give students more exposure to family physicians and family medicine right from the beginning of their medical education, in hopes of encouraging them to choose that direction.

“One way of encouraging more students to select family medicine as a career is to have more generalists and family physicians teaching the undergraduate curriculum so they interact and see them as role models,” said Dr. Nick Busing, president of the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada. “A lot of this is driven by the need in the community for more family doctors.”

And the approach is not new. Quebec’s other medical schools are already headed in this direction.

“There is pressure from the government to address this,” said Dr. Jean Pelletier, director of the family medicine and emergency department for the Université de Montréal. “About 30 per cent of Quebecers don’t have access to a family doctor so there is still a big deficit.”

He said U de M has already started working to “create excitement” about family medicine, and the same is true at the Université Laval as well.

Laval’s medical school has already built a new curriculum around promoting more interest in family medicine, said Dr. Guy Béland, director of the family and emergency medicine department.

“We are definitely trying to give students more exposure to family medicine from the first to the fourth year of the program,” he said.

And it’s paying off. This year, more than 50 per cent of Laval’s students chose a family medicine residency, meaning the university has already achieved the goal set out by the government for next year.

“This is the first time we passed 50 per cent and we’re very proud of that,” said Béland. “Now we have to see if we can maintain it.”