The Red Book - The College of Family Physicians Canada

services, community services or seminars with marginalized populations, and scholarly work. Ifresidents are not taught by family medicine faculty, they should be placed in a clinical context inwhich the preceptors understand and respect the role and the educational needs of familymedicine learners. The family medicine residency program must plan and approve theseexperiences in consultation with the other specialty departments involved.Family medicine residency training must occur in clinical settings that enable residents tolearn the competencies required. The experiences arising from time immersed in family practicesettings are vital to the development of a resident’s overall competence and identity as a familyphysician. Family practice settings must provide residents with the opportunity to experienceboth the roles of the family physician and the scope of family practice. Residents must be able toestablish a small practice of their own for which they would assume major responsibility forintegrating the full care of those patients with whom they have continuing relationships. Familypractice experiences should be organized to reflect appropriate patterns of practice, and residentsmust work together with and be supervised by effective family physician role models. It isexpected that residents will be engaged in core family medicine clinical experiences throughouttheir training program.While the curriculum must always provide for a sufficient continuity of learning contextand continuity of preceptors, sufficient exposure to different contexts of practice that reflectdifferent population health needs must also be provided.Just as practising family physicians work largely in office settings, so residents must bebased primarily in family practice office settings. Residents must provide clinical care acrossdifferent settings: hospital, long-term care facilities, and home care settings, as well as in theoffice. Residents must provide care to patients at every stage of life, from birth to death. Thisincludes care of children and adults, men and women, the elderly, and palliation and end-of-lifecare. A sufficient clinical experience in a rural practice setting must be provided to all residentsto ensure that the competencies and experience necessary to serving the needs of ruralcommunities are acquired.In order to learn the comprehensive nature of family medicine, family practice–basedpatient care activities must comprise the majority of the resident’s clinical experience. Ideally, aresident’s family practice experience would make up more than half of a resident’s clinicalexperience each week, with the exception of off-service experiences that might require more18