Table 7.
Suggested Program Guidelines to Further the Vision and Mission of Family Medicine Resident Education
| Guideline | Description |
|---|---|
| Flexibility/responsiveness | Ability to provide education in areas needed to meet geographical and community needs |
| Innovation/active experimentation | Programs encouraged to try new methods of education, including 4-year curriculum pilot programs, and to teach the cutting edge of evidence-based medical knowledge |
| Consistency/reliability | Programs provide a basic core of knowledge and produce family physicians who exemplify the values of the health care system articulated by the Institute of Medicine |
| Individualized to learners’ needs and the needs of the communities in which they plan to serve | Programs offer enhanced educational opportunities in areas needed by graduates, such as maternity care, orthopedics, and emergency care |
| Supportive of critical thinking | Programs encourage and/or require research and expect a thorough understanding of evidence-based medical practice |
| Competency-based education | Programs stress a new paradigm for evaluation of resident performance based on competency assessments |
| Scholarship- and practice-based learning | Programs integrate scholarship and quality improvement through analysis and interventions built around patient care activities in the continuity setting |
| Integration of evidence-based and patient-centered knowledge | Programs model knowledge acquisition and processing from both perspectives in the patient care setting |
| Medical informatics | Programs go beyond just using an electronic health record (EHR) to modeling the broad-based acquisition, processing, and documentation potential within state-of-the-art informatics resources |
| Biopsychosocial integration | An emphasis on the interdependence and interplay among different levels of the system—whether it is the cardiovascular system, the individual, the family, the community, or the larger social context |
| Professionalism | Programs move beyond the simple objectives of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education professionalism curriculum requirements into a comprehensive monitoring and feedback system to residents during the critical developmental period of residency training |
| Collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to all learning | Programs provide both support and role modeling for the effective use of teams and interdisciplinary approaches to patient care, including the involvement of other trainees in the process |