Continuing Medical Education and Family Physician Certification Initiatives

CMEpalooza is back in 2020 for the sixth consecutive year with our Fall meetings slated for Wednesday, October 14. As always, we’ll be continuing our mission of no-cost, high-quality education for the CME/CE community. Our audience and influence continue to grow – we broke records (by far!) in Spring 2020 for web site visitors and session viewership. That’s good news for us and good news for our sponsors. More eyeballs means more exposure. You’ll see in the Sponsor Prospectus that we have added a few new goodies to bring even more value to our sponsors this fall.

CMEpalooza Fall Sponsors

Our sponsorships tend to go quickly these days, especially at the higher tiers where there are limited numbers, so don’t think for too long if you are interested in those. Here is the data regarding the organizations supporting these educational initiatives:

Preparing and Certifying the Family Physicians That Canada Needs

In response to the current health system crisis with an extreme shortage of family physicians, and based on consultation with our educational community, the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) has developed an Educational Action Plan (EAP) based on four educational priorities. The CFPC is the educational standard setting and certifying body for family medicine representing over 45,000 members. We support family medicine teaching and research and advocate on behalf of the specialty of family medicine, family physicians, and the patients they serve. Through these roles, we help to shape the health workforce.

The EAP is centred on our purpose to prepare and certify the family physicians that Canada needs in support of the Quintuple Aim to improve patient experience, population health, provider well-being, value, and health equity. The need is great to improve the number, mix, distribution and capacity of family physicians in Canada and governments have expanded and opened new medical schools with the aim of addressing the shortage. The CFPC seeks to work with its academic partners to improve the success of these initiatives.

Educational Roadmap and Key Initiatives

The CFPC’s primary responsibility is to maintain and uphold an appropriately high and rigorous standard for training that keeps up with the times and prepares the next generation of family physicians. Through in-depth research and consultation, we were able to discover and define what is needed to strengthen family medicine education. Key highlights from the Educational Action Plan include:

• The Re-envisioning the Future of Assessment, Certification, and Examination (ReFACE) Project
• Curriculum Collaborative in Family Medicine
• Team Primary Care – Training for Transformation

Debunking OTP Myths: Spotlighting Real Solutions

To enhance your understanding of the OTP, we have gathered and addressed the most prevalent misconceptions making sure you have a clear perspective of how transformative the project will be for our profession.

Myth 1: A three-year residency will undermine the profession and drive people away from becoming family doctors.

• Fact: A three-year renewed residency will not create a gap year without graduates. Full stop.
• Fact: The three-year renewed residency will be phased in gradually starting in 2027.
• Fact: A three-year renewed residency will strengthen training. We know that there are competencies that many programs are not able to tackle or strengthen because of time constraints.

In a renewed three-year residency, our aim is to have residents in their transitional phase of training provide service in needed areas with a commitment to underserved communities and unattached patients. The three-year renewed residency will better prepare graduates to practice anywhere, ideally in a team setting, and adjust to the changing role of family physicians. This will increase health workforce capacity, efficiency, and care coordination that may reduce referrals while helping managing complex, chronic illness.