Response

Jennifer Campbell

Thank you, Dr Tomislav Svoboda and Dr Kimberly Wintemute for your interest and constructive suggestions for Family Medicine Forum (FMF). We appreciate you taking the time to provide your feedback.

We will address each point you have mentioned. First, regarding plant-based meals, approximately 20% to 30% of vegetarian and vegan selections are included at each food service area within FMF. The boxed lunches containing meat are generally a few ounces of meat-based protein accompanied by vegetables, fruits, and grains. We make every effort to select healthy and fresh choices, while being mindful of budgets and efficiencies to serve thousands of meals and snacks in a limited window. We appreciate your suggestions and reference documents, and these will be reviewed and considered by our Conferences and Events committee. We will strive to continue to improve upon and stress the importance of healthy plant-based options to be offered efficiently and at reasonable prices, as we work with all our event venues across Canada.

In regard to single-use plastics, we are proud to say that at this past FMF in Vancouver, BC, we had no single-use plastics in our food and beverage program. Corn-based, fully compostable cups and containers were used by the Vancouver Convention Centre (VCC). The VCC has a complete in-house environmental team and all waste is hand-sorted and sent to 3 different processing companies to minimize and reduce actual garbage to extremely low levels. We were also able to come to an agreement with the facility to bring in our own Tetra Pak water cartons for instances requiring packaged water, and we confirmed in advance that these would be fully recycled through one of the VCC waste management partners; the lid was also corn based and compostable. We are working nearly a year ahead with each main FMF facility to put expectations, packaging, and serving options in place to eliminate all single-use plastics from our food and beverage program.

Regarding virtual attendance, we are in our third year of offering FMF Live, a live-streaming, daily registration option that we promote to all members via e-mail blasts. It is Mainpro+ certified for 1 credit per hour, and can be delivered straight to your electronic device. This live-streaming option is available on our website (fmf.cfpc.ca) under “Educate” then “FMF Live” (the direct link is fmf.cfpc.ca/fmf-live/). Early this year we are launching FMF On Demand, which will also be found at fmf.cfpc.ca under “Educate” then “FMF On Demand” (direct online link is fmf.cfpc.ca/fmf-on-demand/). This will offer Mainpro+ certified 1-credit-per-hour sessions that were captured at FMF, with postevaluation questions. We also plan to promote this to all members and hope this contributes to our quest of providing high-quality and accessible continuing professional development content to all our members.

Thank you again for the inquiry, and we look forward to continuing to learn, improve, and build upon the health and environmental awareness of all our CFPC events.