Abstract
Objective To explore the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) student and graduate experience of generalism in rural practice, in the context of a growing discourse on generalism.
Design Qualitative analysis.
Setting Northern Ontario School of Medicine in multiple sites across northern Ontario, which is the NOSM campus.
Participants A total of 37 graduating medical students and 9 practising NOSM graduates.
Methods The Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research and NOSM tracking studies use mixed methods drawing on data from various sources. This paper reports on an arts-based study using semistructured interviews.
Main findings Key themes from student observations include an affinity for the northern Ontario environment and a recognition that rural medicine involves a broad scope of practice. Students from NOSM consider generalist care to be a comprehensive service with a strong focus on responding to the health needs of the communities they serve. Beyond primary care, a rural medicine “true generalist” is viewed as a complete package—a physician who provides care ranging from promoting prevention to performing specialist tasks.
Conclusion Rural practitioners, particularly in family medicine, are extended generalists with a broad scope of practice guided by the health needs of the communities they serve. The NOSM students’ and graduates’ experience of rural generalism is positive and highly influential in determining their career directions, including specialty, scope, and location of practice. The generalist approach of NOSM might be effective beyond rural applications and an advantageous approach for foundational medical education. Students and graduates report that NOSM’s distributed community-engaged learning prepares them well for rural generalist practice.
The chronic shortage of physicians in many under-serviced communities in northern and rural Canada was a driving force for the initiative “to establish an innovative, community based medical school in Northern Ontario.”1 The school, now known as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), has actualized this initiative by developing an integrated community-engaged educational system oriented around the concept of rural generalism. This paper reports on interviews with students and practising graduates of NOSM, exploring their experiences and highlighting the need for and effectiveness of generalism in medical education.
Over the past decade, there has been a growing discourse on “generalism” in health care, medicine, and medical education.2–11 This discourse has occurred in the context of greater subspecialization in health care and recognition of the need for doctors and other health professionals with the skills to address the priority health needs of the communities they serve.12–14 The Future of Medical Education in Canada visions for medical education in 201015 and for postgraduate education in 201216 both emphasize the importance of students and residents developing generalist knowledge and skills, and learning in relevant generalist clinical settings. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada defines generalism as “a philosophy of care that is distinguished by a commitment to the breadth of practice within each discipline and collaboration with the larger health care team in order to respond to patient and community needs.”17 In addition, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada established a collaborative Task Force on Advancing Rural Family Medicine,18 which produced The Rural Road Map for Action.19
In 2005, NOSM opened with a social accountability mandate focused on improving the health of the people and communities of northern Ontario.1 The school recruits students from northern Ontario or similar backgrounds and provides distributed community-engaged learning in more than 90 clinical and community settings located in the region—a vast underserved rural part of Canada. The school serves as the Faculty of Medicine of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay (population 120 000) and of Laurentian University in Sudbury (population 160 000). These 2 universities are more than 1000 km apart and provide teaching, research, and administrative bases for NOSM, which views the entire geography of northern Ontario as its campus.20,21
Of note, NOSM was the first medical school in the world in which all students undertake a longitudinal integrated clerkship, the comprehensive community clerkship (CCC).22–24 Based in family practice, the CCC comprises the third year of the 4-year graduate entry undergraduate program. Rather than a series of clerkship block rotations, students meet patients in family practice such that “the curriculum walks through the door.” Students follow these patients and their families, including when cared for by other specialists, so as to experience continuity of care in family practice. During the year, students achieve learning objectives that cover the same 6 core clinical disciplines as in traditional clerkship blocks. Students live in 1 of 15 large rural or small urban communities in northern Ontario, excluding the cities of Sudbury and Thunder Bay. In essence, NOSM students learn their core clinical medicine from the family practice and community perspective, while also gaining exposure to community-based specialist care. The CCC synthesizes generalist practice with specialist learning objectives driven by the needs of the communities rather than by predetermined lesson plans.
For NOSM, generalism is 1 of 8 key academic principles that guide the development, delivery, and evaluation of its academic activities, including student admission processes, faculty appointments and development, curriculum, teaching methods, clinical training, and community placement. Generalism, as it is used and represented in the NOSM curriculum, entails a broad scope of skills, attitudes, and knowledge, regardless of whether or not the medical practice is primary, secondary, or tertiary care. Consequently, at NOSM there is an emphasis on learning in context, including community and clinical settings where NOSM graduates are expected to practise; longitudinal learning that supports continuity of relationships with patients and clinical teachers; interprofessional collaboration and integrated clinical learning; community engagement with authentic participation by community members; and support, recognition, and reward of community clinicians as faculty members and as role models with a breadth of expertise, as well as mentors for the students.
Generalism at NOSM applies, therefore, to student learning in the curriculum, as well as to the education sites and the clinical faculty who serve as educators. In addition, generalism, while wholly applicable to all stages of medical education, is applied also to all NOSM programs (health sciences, interprofessional programs, and research).25
After a decade, there is evidence that NOSM is successful in producing generalist physicians who choose to practise in northern Ontario or in similar northern, remote, rural community settings. Since the first graduating class in 2009, 62% of NOSM MD graduates have chosen to train in family medicine (predominantly rural), 33% have chosen other general specialties (internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, etc), and the remaining 5% are pursuing careers in subspecialties like dermatology, ophthalmology, and plastic surgery. Residency programs are offered by NOSM in family medicine and 8 other general specialties. Approximately 69% of NOSM residency graduates are practising in northern Ontario, and 94% of NOSM MD graduates who undertook residency training in northern Ontario are practising in northern Ontario, including 33% in the smaller communities.20,26
METHODS
The Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research and NOSM are collaborating in mixed-methods studies that track NOSM undergraduate and postgraduate medical learners using administrative data from NOSM and external sources, as well as surveys and interviews of students, graduates, and other informants.27 Ethical approval for these studies was granted by the research ethics boards of Laurentian and Lakehead Universities. The study reported here involved qualitative analysis of interviews.
Between 2005 and 2009, H.C., a Laurentian University academic and filmmaker, conducted 61 semistructured entry interviews and 37 semistructured exit interviews (approximately 20 minutes each) for the 2005 to 2009 entry cohorts. After 5 cohorts, saturation had been achieved in terms of the key messages and themes reported by the students. After the final exit interviews in 2013, we decided to develop a paper focused on themes relating to students’ experience of rural practice and rural generalism. However, the stories were incomplete without interviews of NOSM graduates’ experience after some time in practice. Subsequently, we decided to interview NOSM graduates and other informants for a film marking NOSM’s 10th anniversary in 2015. For the film, The Rural Challenge and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine,28 there were interviews with 9 NOSM graduates: 6 rural family physicians, 1 urban emergency physician, 1 urban family physician, and 1 urban-based ear, nose, and throat specialist who also serves a rural community. Participants were invited to begin by sharing their thoughts on the 10th anniversary of NOSM, and then, depending on their stories, were asked about specific ideas and experiences of their pathways of training and practice, as well as their views of their undergraduate generalist education.
The data that inform this paper were collected in 2 ways: formal but semistructured interviews and documentary filmmaking in an arts-based health research model.1,29–31 Thematic analyses were undertaken collaboratively in various stages of the filmmaking research. Funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, H.C. is involved in international health research on arts-based methods, which identified 2 important contributions of the arts in health research: data collection and knowledge dissemination.32 The making of The Rural Challenge film served as a data collection and analysis tool, helping to develop a multifaceted narrative about the experiences of the students. As a film, it also functions as a knowledge transfer tool. Through making the film, we teamed up with the film participants to tell their stories, centred on the theme of rural generalism. In turn, the stories from the film footage provide research data. Film participants gave permission to be quoted whether or not they appeared in the film. Quotations in this paper are drawn from exit interviews (year noted) or the film interviews in 2015.
FINDINGS
Key themes from the student observations include an affinity for the northern Ontario environment; a recognition that rural medicine involves a broad scope of practice; a view of generalist care as a comprehensive service responding to the health needs of the communities served; a perception that “doing everything” includes knowing when to refer; a belief that rural practitioners are “true generalists”—a complete package ranging from promoting prevention to performing specialist tasks; and a sense that NOSM provides intensive clinical training through community engagement.
The excerpts of student comments that follow exemplify these themes, beginning with an affinity for the northern Ontario environment and a recognition that rural medicine involves a broad scope of practice:
I love the north shore; I love the Canadian Shield—the physical geography between Sudbury and Sault Ste Marie north to Chapleau. That’s always where I will end up …. To do the things that I’d like to do … I can do rural emergency medicine, I can do a little bit of family practice, I can do anesthesia … with a family practice license and an extra year. (2009)
Having had 8 months in [a large rural community] last year, I quite enjoyed it and I see that that would be a place I would be happy practising in. The bottom line is that one can always learn. The key of rural practice is to stay resourceful and learning all the time. Internal medicine and pediatrics are something that I am choosing to begin with. (2009)
My dad is a physician in a rural community and he’s one of those guys who have done everything: [emergency], inpatients, [intensive care], obstetrics, oncology, minor procedures, primary care, internal medicine …. He is an excellent role model for me. In my placements, seeing others in similar situations doing the same thing really excited me …. The most attractive feature of family medicine for me is the ability to diversify my practice and offer a full-service practice to my patients. I don’t want to be a physician who has to send his patients away 8 hours to go see a specialist. (2009)
The 2-year family medicine program would set me up to develop other necessary knowledge for general practice in the grand scheme of things. In a rural setting it’s more of a generalist thought. When you get into an urban setting you’re so pigeonholed into thinking one thing, based on specialty. With NOSM, having a generalist background, I can take in all the different aspects of what might be affecting a patient. Generalist rural medicine is more holistic. (2013)
Students from NOSM consider generalist care to be comprehensive service, without the nearby support of other specialists. Urban-style, office-based family medicine is, therefore, insufficient to describe rural generalist family practice. Students report a strong focus on responding to the health needs of the communities they serve, consistent with social accountability.33
Family medicine is the jack-of-all-trades; it’s the guy who does everything when nobody else is there to handle the problems, which is probably a misnomer when you label a rural physician as a family medicine doctor. The family medicine specialty in different communities takes on different roles …. Through my residency, when I was doing primary care in family medicine rotations in [a large urban setting], our focus was very consultant driven—exercise, weight, blood sugar—whereas when I was working in [an isolated community] the focus was be all and all, with a full stop. So we sometimes had to do what I would probably consider pretty heroic measures where the physicians there would come together to deal with whatever problem drops on the doorstep. They would wear different hats. Some of them with general surgery skills, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to see them do [cesarean] sections; others would have more interests in anesthesia, and they would be there to support their colleagues. Some would have more interest in emergency medicine like the type of physician I am. When there would be a trauma or a challenging emergency case, they would help deal with that. Rural family medicine is more of an entity of its own. (2015)
Rural generalists from NOSM are attracted to the field because they want to “do everything,” and this includes knowing when to refer patients to specialists. Having practised for 3 years as a family physician, one of the graduates commented:
With any job you need to know your limitations …. You need to know where your level of expertise ends and you need to know when to ask for help. Being a family physician is the same thing. I will never cross my boundary. I do send patients to specialists or colleagues of mine who have more expertise. (2015)
We asked a NOSM graduate who did his residency in an urban centre, and who now practises family medicine in a community with a population of 3500, what it would take to convince him to work in Toronto, Ont:
I do enjoy urban life. But to convince me of working in an urban setting, I would probably want a hospital that will allow me to work in the emergency room because I like the variety … and maybe put me close to a park … and give me a contract that does not make me stay for the rest of my life because I don’t think I can stay away from rural practice for my whole life. (2015)
“I like the variety,” “I like the challenges,” or “I want to do everything” was a recurring motif with NOSM interviewees who chose rural practice. The difference between rural and urban family medicine does not only lead to the notion of a broad scope of rural practice phenomenon, but it also creates divergence in training. One of the NOSM graduates recalls his city teaching hospital residency experience: “We were working in different departments. ‘Oh what resident are you?’ ‘I’m in family medicine.’ ‘Oh well, take this easy case.’ It’s disheartening.” (2015)
The interviewee then makes a clear distinction between metropolitan and rural practices, emphasizing that “the true generalist” is based on the needs of rural practice:
In metropolitan areas, because you have [a] diversity of specialists as a resource, [family] doctors tend not to take their investigations too far down the line. In rural practice, if this person has anemia, consulting with hematology up in [an urban centre], I have to do a full anemia workup. If I need to do a bone marrow biopsy, I will have to do it myself …. I [have to] incorporate some of the specialist jobs with the aspects of primary care and preventive medicine. Rural medicine shows that diversity. That’s where you find the true generalists. (2015)
At NOSM, generalist education provides practical skills for rural family medicine and provides an alternative perspective for specialist training. One NOSM graduate who became an ear, nose, and throat specialist comments:
At NOSM the philosophy was to obtain your generalist knowledge through the medium of family medicine. As one person said to me one time, the difference between the traditional school and NOSM was “when you hear hooves, you should think horses before you think zebras.” I think that is what NOSM does through family medicine: if you hear hooves, think horses. That is what I think they mean by “generalist.” I don’t think the goal is just to train family physicians …. If NOSM takes us, the students, into a very tertiary hospital and working in the floors with these super-complicated issues, then we would learn to think zebras before horses. (2015)
Students and graduates from NOSM view rural medicine “true generalist” care as broader than primary care—more as a complete package ranging from promoting prevention to performing specialist tasks. In addition, NOSM’s comprehensive clerkship in smaller communities has the advantage of small group (or even one-on-one) learning, thus building a strong foundation for the learners’ clinical knowledge and problem-solving skills. One graduate recalls:
I guess another important thing, maybe other people have told you this too: I was shocked. Because I went to NOSM, I learned in that environment with a lot of generalists in smaller centres where you get to be first assistant to surgery and you get to do things early. When I was in fourth year to do some of my elective rotations at bigger hospitals, I was astounded at how much people were not doing what I have been lucky enough to do. I remember going to this one rotation where in my head I expected that I was going to be first assistant and so I went over the surgery the night before and had all my answers prepared. When I got there, I was the 17th person in the room. I was nowhere near the surgery that was going on. I was standing against the wall at the back. Nobody asked me a single question. I thought, “Holy cow, I am so lucky to have had the training that I did.” (2015)
There were many similar stories. The provision of intensive clinical training through community engagement at NOSM is the most praised feature of the school mentioned by students in their exit interviews. Interviewees also reported a strong affinity for northern Ontario and for the broad spectrum of practice options that are available in response to the needs of the people of northern Ontario.
DISCUSSION
This paper reports on the NOSM student and graduate experience of rural generalism in northern Ontario. The central message of the students is that rural practitioners, particularly in family medicine, are true generalists with a broad scope of practice guided by the health needs of the communities they serve. Key themes from student observations include an affinity for the northern Ontario environment and a recognition that rural medicine involves a broad scope of practice. Students from NOSM consider generalist care to be a comprehensive service with a strong focus on responding to the health needs of the communities they serve. Beyond primary care, a rural medicine true generalist is viewed as a complete package—a physician who provides care ranging from promoting prevention to performing specialist tasks. The students and graduates report that the NOSM distributed community-engaged learning model prepares them well for rural generalist practice.
In addition, the NOSM model prepares graduates well for subspecialty training. In most years, all NOSM students have been matched in the first round of the national residency match (Canadian Resident Matching Service), including matching to subspecialties like dermatology, radiation oncology, and neurology.34 These findings suggest that NOSM’s generalist approach is effective beyond rural applications and provide evidence that rural generalism is an advantageous approach for foundational medical education.35
The study findings are consistent with other research, which shows that, when compared with their metropolitan counterparts, rural practitioners can be described as “extended generalists.”36–38 Rural practitioners provide a wider range of services, sustain a heavier workload, and carry a higher level of clinical responsibility in relative professional isolation. These characteristics hold true for all rural practitioners, whether they are physicians (in various specialties), nurses, pharmacists, or other health professionals.
In addition, the findings from this study contribute to the growing discourse about rural generalist medicine39 and the value of rural generalist training pathways—both from the perspective of health work force supply and of socially accountable education.40 This includes recognition of the limitations of dividing roles in the health system into primary, secondary, and tertiary. The rural generalist’s key role is in ensuring access to care at all levels, whether this care is provided directly by the rural practitioner or by other specialists who might interact with patients in person, by telemedicine, or at a larger centre to which the patients have to travel.
Limitations
The study reports the analysis of 37 student exit interviews and interviews with 9 graduates from NOSM, so findings should be interpreted in this context. Further research might include more interviews with urban-based family physicians or other specialists. Additional interviews would permit comparison among schools and allow comparison of NOSM graduates who go to other medical schools for their residency training versus those who complete their residency at NOSM.
Conclusion
Rural generalist medicine is not an alternative to urban specialist care, rather it is the explicit provision of high-quality health care within the geographic, demographic, and cultural context, and the human and material resource constraints, of rural communities. Overall, interview transcripts show that the experiences of NOSM students and graduates in rural generalism, especially through community placements, have contributed substantially to shaping their choices of career direction including specialty, scope, and location of practice. Key themes from the interviews emphasize the breadth of knowledge and skills required for rural practice in any specialty and the limitations of metropolitan sub-specialty-driven concepts of specialty scopes of practice, including in family medicine. Motivated by social accountability and built on a generalist undergraduate foundation, NOSM students and graduates respond to rural community health needs in pursuing their clinical learning and in subsequent clinical practice.
Notes
Editor’s key points
▸ The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) opened in 2005 with a social accountability mandate focused on improving the health of the people of northern Ontario; NOSM recruits students from northern Ontario or similar backgrounds and provides distributed community-engaged learning in more than 90 clinical and community settings located in the region—a vast underserved rural part of Canada.
▸ This article reports on the NOSM student and graduate experience of rural generalism in northern Ontario. Interviews showed that the experiences of NOSM students and graduates in rural generalism, especially through community placements, have contributed substantially to shaping their choices of career direction including specialty, scope, and location of practice.
▸ Key themes from the interviews emphasize the breadth of knowledge and skills required for rural practice in any specialty and the limitations of metropolitan subspecialty-driven concepts of specialty scopes of practice, including in family medicine. Motivated by social accountability and built on a generalist undergraduate foundation, NOSM students and graduates respond to rural community health needs in pursuing their clinical learning and in subsequent clinical practice.
Points de repère du rédacteur
▸ La faculté de médecine du nordouest de l’Ontario (FMNOO) a reçu ses premiers étudiants en 2015 avec un mandat de responsabilité sociale axé sur l’amélioration de la santé des habitants de cette région de l’Ontario; pour cette raison, elle recrute des étudiants du nord-ouest de l’Ontario ou de régions semblables et offre un apprentissage distribué en milieu communautaire dans 90 cliniques et établissements communautaires situés dans une vaste région rurale du Canada où les services de santé sont souvent insuffisants.
▸ Cet article traite de l’expérience qu’ont les étudiants et les diplômés de la FMNOO de la pratique en tant qu’omnipraticiens dans le nordouest de l’Ontario. Les interviews ont montré que l’expérience des étudiants et des diplômés comme généralistes en région rurale, notamment lors de stages dans les collectivités, a eu une influence certaine sur le choix d’une spécialité, d’un champ de pratique et d’un lieu de pratique.
▸ Les principaux thèmes tirés des interviews mettent en évidence la somme des connaissances et des habiletés nécessaires à la médecine rurale dans toute spécialité, et les limites des concepts de champs de pratique spécialisés axés sur les sous-spécialités, incluant la médecine familiale. Conscients de leur devoir de responsabilité sociale et munis d’une solide formation en médecine générale, les étudiants et les diplômés de la FMNOO répondent adéquatement aux besoins de santé des communautés en continuant de parfaire leur formation de façon à pouvoir l’utiliser dans leur pratique.
Footnotes
Contributors
All authors contributed to the concept and design of the study; data gathering, analysis, and interpretation; and preparing the manuscript for submission.
Competing interests
None declared
This article has been peer reviewed.
Cet article a fait l’objet d’une révision par des pairs.
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