Complementing undergraduate medical training

We thank Drs Keegan, Scott, Tan, and Horrey and Ms Tissera for bringing forth an important reminder to Canadian Family Physician readers on the existence and success of the Shared Canadian Curriculum in Family Medicine (SHARC-FM).¹ We were remiss in not mentioning in our article² the important contribution of SHARC-FM, carried out by undergraduate family medicine leaders working collaboratively over the past 10 years, sharing a common approach to family medicine learning. As noted on its website, SHARC-FM is a “matrix of family medicine educational resources (objectives, point-of-care tools, cases, etc.) that educators and trainees can use to support learning in family medicine.”³ We believe its effects have been important in Canada. As shared in our article: Nearly all participants (92%) felt either positive or strongly positive about their choice to be family physicians ... participants believed they had had extensive experiences within family medicine settings while in medical school, with strong family medicine role models.²

This finding reflects the work of family medicine undergraduate leaders and provides some evidence of the positive effects SHARC-FM has had in exposing medical students to family medicine in Canada. We used resident entrance surveys to elicit more specific information about the level and type of exposure to the different domains of clinical care⁴ affiliated with the discipline of family medicine. We hope the findings of our paper serve to complement the work of SHARC-FM and provide further information for those developing undergraduate family medicine curricula.

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