Shared Canadian Curriculum in Family Medicine (SHARC-FM): Creating a national consensus on relevant and practical training for medical students

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Figure 1.
Example Canadian Family Medicine Clinical Card
Reproduced from Wickenheiser et al.¹⁷

Table 1.

Stakeholder groups and needs for a national family medicine clerkship curriculum

GROUP	NEEDS
Family medicine undergraduate education leaders	Time-efficient (ie, must not be a big burden) Supportive of the ED-2 criteria (ie, the clinical experiences students are required to have for the purposes of program accreditation) Voluntary (ie, must not be a prescribed curriculum) Available in both official Canadian languages (French and English) Developed along a family medicine perspective and spectrum of care (ie, not simply a collection of ambulatory medicine resources)
Medical schools	Respectful of local control over local curriculum Rigorous in development
Students	Easily accessible Directly supportive of learning of key topics in family medicine Kept up to date
Patients	Reliable and kept up to date, supporting up-to-date clinical care by learners
Clinical preceptors	Easily accessible

Table 2.

Guiding principles for SHARC-FM

PRINCIPLE	DESCRIPTION
Shared and open sourced	The curricular materials would be developed together and freely shared. All Canadian departments of family medicine would endeavour to participate in their development. There would be no profit derived from the distribution of any materials
Voluntary	The materials in SHARC-FM would be educational resources for local family medicine education programs to use to support their curriculum. In other words, SHARC-FM would not dictate what local curricula would be
Design methodology	The materials in SHARC-FM would be fully aligned and comprise a range of resources for learning and assessment. They would be developed according to pedagogic standards, and a scholarly approach would be pursued at all times. SHARC-FM would provide a route to scholarship for its contributors
Family medicine based	SHARC-FM would be grounded in family medicine: ie, anchored in the patient-centred clinical method⁹ and the longitudinal relationship that patients have with their family doctors, and based on evidence that is relevant to family medicine contexts
Bilingual	SHARC-FM would seek to have all materials available in both French and English, likely through external funding achieved once a substantial portion of the curriculum was built and demonstrated to be successful