Program Overview and Principles

Our four-year MD program  is community informed and evidence-based to align with the School of Medicine’s social accountability mandate. It is rooted in principles of community-driven care and cultural respect and safety, with equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, Reconciliation, decolonization and health equity intentionally embedded across all aspects of the program. It has been purposely constructed to align with our vision, mission, values, program objectives and learning outcomes.

In order to best support students’ development of problem-solving skills and meaning-making, we follow the principles of a model known as the Master Adaptive Learner characterized by inquiry-based learning, small group case-based learning, and purposeful revisiting of concepts. Team projects, team-based learning and service learning provide opportunities to learn with health partners in the community. The aim is to produce graduates who will advocate for and deliver change within the healthcare profession.  

The curriculum, which is built on the integration of biomedical, clinical, social and health systems sciences and offers opportunities for early engagement in clinical placements, prepares students for success in the Integrated Health Centres that are associated with our School.

Our vision involves preparing a new kind of physician to serve as health system leaders and advocates in ways that disrupt the status quo and impel a transformation of the provincial and national health systems. Students are trained to learn and work in interprofessional teams, which are critical to healthcare provision, and to leverage technology to deliver and continually advance the best person-centred care and community-based services to the populations being served. Opportunities for learning will involve structured experiential sessions from partner professional schools at TMU as well as from community-based health and health-related professionals.

The following principles guide the curriculum:

• Learner-centred education leading to the delivery of person/community-centred care upon graduation.
  
• Excellence in teaching and faculty development.
  
• Outcomes-based approaches to assessment using adaptations of the framework known as competency-based medical education.
  
• Integration of biomedical, clinical, social and health systems sciences, as well as curricular threads, across all courses and phases of the program with increasing complexity of curricular content.
  
• Progression from simple to more complex scenarios of patient care using a life-span and body-systems-based learning model that integrates through case-based and team-based methods.
  
• Case-based learning on common and critical health presentations to primary care (acute and chronic mental and physical health) in Brampton/Peel and Canada across the full age spectrum of patients.
  
• Ensuring EDIA principles are incorporated as a lens in each learning session and are foundational in writing cases, selecting session objectives, completing assessments and reviewing outcome data annually for ongoing curriculum improvement. 
  
• A penultimate experiential learning experience of “Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship” (LIC) will be a unique Canadian clerkship experience. The LIC is modelled to allow for a meaningful student education that highlights the principles of continuity of care for acute and chronic disease and its prevention and learning in diverse community contexts. It will entail clinical training in primary care settings, with students working in interdisciplinary patient care environments.Program  This involves clinical learning occurring primarily in outpatient community clinics and clinical affiliates (e.g. healthcare institutions such as hospitals).
  
• Interprofessional learning beginning in Year 1 of the curriculum, with opportunities for iterative deepening of interprofessional experiences in ever more complex scenarios and circumstances.
  
• Programmatic assessments and other competency-based medical education assessment processes to foster ongoing deep learning with a focus on feedback and continual improvement.
  
• Addressing the hidden curriculum with the LIC and a placement with and teaching by selected family physicians and generalist educators in small-group learning settings.
  
• Supporting learners to achieve all program learning outcomes by graduation via incremental assessments and milestone expectations at each phase.
  
• Student learning in defined clinical contexts that supports a broad generalist learning experience and approach to care in their future careers.
  
• Integrating knowledge, skills and abilities of the physician into patient care and assessing learning outcomes using the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC) Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) starting from the first year.