2012 FMF: Toronto!

Off to a great start at this year's FMF Education Forum learning about challenges medical learners and new graduates face as they progress through personal and professional transitions and "microtransitions".  Great discussion and hope to incorporate some of today's ideas into our QBOL program.

The times (on call) are a'changing.

Just a quick update today prompted by an article I read in the Medical Post (here's the link - hope it works but I had to log in to get to this article) describing how the CMA passed a motion to limit resident call to 16 hours or less.

The idea of decreasing from 24 hour call seems to be gaining traction across Canada but I know it's a "hot button" topic where effects can range from the obvious (like changes to call schedules) to the more unexpected (e.g. will fewer hours on call in training lead to a change in the duration of training?).

I would not say I have strong feelings either way but am very interested in how this develops as it will affect our curriculum.  This article also mentions that some of the Quebec programs that were early adopters of this type of policy are not that happy with the results so far.

Please leave a comment if you have any insight to share about this.

Camp Oconto - September 2012

Well, last week marked my first visit to Camp Oconto and it was a wonderful experience.  It really was the first chance for the current crop of Queen's FM residents from all sites and all years to mingle as a group.  This was facilitated by the 75% cooperative weather (not counting the program director-powered "hurricane" the first day), the beautiful backdrop of Eagle Lake, engaging speakers, and many enjoyable team-building / communication-enhancing / medical knowledge-testing activities.  Thanks again to the organizing committee - your planning efforts were certainly noticed and appreciated!

I'll attach a few photos here to give a taste of the activities but the photos really don't do justice to the experience.  Or the memories.  It was truly humbling to see how many future family physicians we are helping to prepare.

I can't wait for next year's wilderness medicine experience in Temagami!

Receiving instructions while itching for "lake-time".

A great "classroom" to learn about work-life balance.

High strung teamwork?

An impressive group.

Back to nature.

Resident Perspective

Hello Everyone!
    I am periodically going to be updating the blog as one of the brave pioneer residents of this exciting program. We are currently well in to the swing of things and have all been learning lots along the way. This week we're heading to Camp Oconto for our annual family medicine resident retreat to bond with our fellow Queen's residents. I will give you a more indepth post upon our return along with some pictures of our crew enjoying the great outdoors...Stay tuned!

Also, don't hesitate to reply if there's anything you're particularly curious about!

Cheers
- Stephanie

We're in the local news!

The good news:  Here's a little article that came out of the ALARM course we hosted at the LHEARN earlier this week.  Let's keep up the good work everyone!

DurhamRegion Article: Oshawa medical students get hands-on training on emergency births

The bad news:  According to the article, our residents may have been demoted back to being medical students...

Friday the 13th was a "Nightmares FM" day.

Shhh.

Here are some photos from QBOL's inaugural Nightmares FM course which took place last Thursday and Friday at the LHEARN Centre.  The LHEARN Centre is a recently opened facility housed at Lakeridge Health Oshawa which provides numerous teaching and meeting facilities including two brand new simulation labs.

(And yes, through some fortuitous and entirely unintentional planning, the second day of our Nightmares FM course did actually fall on Friday the 13th.)





This Nightmares FM course welcomed our batch of first year QBOL residents along with additional Queen's residents from other sites in a safe, non-judgemental learning environment.  The goal of this simulation course is to better prepare our future family physicians to respond confidently and competently to the needs of acutely ill patients.

Day 1 briefing session.

Ready to go!

We plan to take advantage of these state of the art facilities with refresher Nightmares FM courses and additional simulation courses.

QBOLers getting ready to roll.

Monitoring the scenario.

I also want to give special thanks to Dr. Randy Wax for assisting with the set up and mannequin support and to Drs. Aubrey Kassirer and Ed Osborne who were the primary instructors.  Your time, effort, preparation, and enthusiasm really helped to set the tone for our first simulation course and made for a very successful learning day!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Nightmares course will hopefully continue with great fun on Friday the 13th, and for lighter fare, the Bowmanville Visual Arts Centre is hosting the Bard's play outside (in if raining) on Sunday only. $15 at 7:30. Should be fun!

And we've launched!

It's been tremendously exciting the last couple days as we've welcomed our first batch of "live" residents to the QBOL site!  The weather over the past couple days has been a bit too damp and then a lot too hot / humid but it hasn't taken away from the true joy of seeing everybody's positive energy and enthusiasm so far.

Continuing the aerospace theme, we'll continue to try to give our residents a "boost" to start things off with our additional planned orientation activities throughout July before everyone settles in to their longitudinal learning experiences woven together with a Family Medicine thread in August.

Just a reminder to our preceptors to feel free to go to the separate preceptor blog (Behind the QBOL - link in the left hand bar on this screen) just to review or comment on things as we progress and a reminder to everybody to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Onwards and upwards!

Fiesta Week in Oshawa June 17-23, 2012

This time, let's try a non-medical post.  This is just a quick "head's up" for anybody who will be in the Durham area over the next week that Fiesta Week in Oshawa kicks off with a midday parade on Father's Day followed by a concert and then a week-long cornucopia of various cultural meals and local entertainment in multiple community centre pavilions all over the city. 

If this has whet your appetite, here is a link to their website: http://www.fiestaweek.ca. 

I'll just paraphrase the famous slogan by way of warning, "Fiesta Week: Tastes Great, Very Filling."

And who says this is the "middle of nowhere"?  ;)

Getting ready for summer.

We're now into June and, instead of heading towards the lazy days of summer, it is a veritable beehive of activity here as we ready for the arrival of our first eight residents.  Excitement is truly in the air!

We've repurposed the blog a bit as well as put in a nice summer photo of the lakefront that is pretty typical for Durham Region along the header here.  This blog will continue to provide information about our curriculum and communities as well as keep you abreast of highlights of the current activities of our residents and our site in general.  I have added a link (under the Web Links section to the side) which will now take our preceptors to a separate "invite-only" area to help support our faculty as we move forward.

Our toolbox month is shaping up nicely although it seems like a month might not be able to contain all of the great early residency learning experiences that we would like.  We shall see!

Doctor's Day 2012

Embarrassingly, I didn't realize that yesterday was Doctor's Day in Ontario until I received a notice from the Ontario College of Family Physicians well into the afternoon.  However, through this notice, I learned that May 1st was chosen as it was the birthday of Dr. Emily Stowe who became Canada's first female physician in 1870.

It still seems to be a fairly low key affair - it was difficult to find a nice description of Doctor's Day.  Here's a little news release from the OMA (It seems the first annual Doctor's Day was just last year which I find a little odd since we've been in Ontario a bit longer than a year...).  Sometimes I think we, as a profession, could do a better job educating the public about the various roles that physicians play in supporting the health of individuals and communities - especially those roles beyond direct patient care.

I think we will just have to make a point of really celebrating Doctor's Day next year!

Eight is Great!

Great news!  We received our second round CaRMS results today; our three remaining PGY-1 spots are filled.  This gives us our full complement of eight first year "pioneer" residents starting this July.  We are very pleased with the quality of students who have matched with us in both rounds.

I honestly can't wait for our site to "go live" in a few months!

Again, I want to let the many people who expressed strong interest and enthusiasm in our site know that there were many unbelievably strong candidates in the second round making it extremely competitive overall.

 

2012 CaRMS Second Round Interviews

Interviews are now underway.  Second round applicants who were selected for interviews should have been notified by now.  I look forward to getting to know you in person or through my fellow interviewers over these next few days.  I must take the time here to formally thank all of my fellow preceptors and administrative staff in Oshawa and Kingston who have assisted our site through this second round process.
For unsuccesful applicants, I offer my condolences.  There are so many very strong candidates, it's unfortunate there are not more spots available to offer.  The applications are reviewed in multiple steps by many Queen's Family Medicine faculty; it is definitely not a "one man" process.  However, from the files that I directly handled, it was often little things - not enough reference letters, small unexplained gaps during training or since completing training - that tripped up an application relative to the others. 

2012 CaRMS second round update

This is just a quick update as it's been tremendously busy.  It's heartening to see that there is still strong interest in our site and appreciation for the type of training we are going to be offering to our residents.

The CaRMS files for our second round applicants are currently being reviewed in Oshawa and Kingston and candidates chosen for interviews should be contacted this week.

Let me end with a quick reminder to myself to address Jann Arden's "middle of nowhere" comment regarding Oshawa when I find some time this week...

"Expect the unexpected."

I had no idea how true that was when somebody tried to brief me about the CaRMS process.  We were expecting to match with our highly ranked and strong learners who have that "pioneer spirit" as we head into our first year as a site.  And we did.  Let me welcome our initial group who have matched here - we truly are ecstatic with our group so far!  Unfortunately, there's just not quite as many signed on as we had hoped - we have three unmatched QBOL spots at this time.

I could insert some cliches about spilled milk, the sun tomorrow, silver linings, and the like but I'll just say things are what they are and we'll make the best of it.  I do believe that things happen for a reason so we will make the best of the opportunities that present in the second round of CaRMS as we try to complete our first group of residents.

If you are an applicant who is heading into the second iteration of CaRMS for Family Medicine, please refer to the CaRMS website for the instructions and timeline for the second iteration.  I hope you make the most of your opportunity as well and good luck.

T - 6 days to Match Day!

Just a quick update today.

Currently, we are busy getting the details of our "toolbox month" sorted out and we are waiting with keen anticipation to find out who will be part of our first group of residents that will be joining us.  One thing that I've learned over the past month is that I am not too good at playing the waiting game...

There's quite a snow storm in the area tonight.  Be safe.  Spring is just around the corner now!

Happy Groundhog Day.

It's very hard to believe that it's already February.  I'm not sure what the groundhogs will be predicting about winter later on this morning although with the winter we've had... is there a way they can predict -6 "more" weeks of winter?

What I think we can predict after finishing our four days of CaRMS interviews is that we are going to have some great learners matched to our program for our inaugural year!  I know that all of us QBOL interviewers found these CaRMS interview days to be a very positive experience.  In particular, it was quite heartening to see the amount of genuine interest in our site.  We've been working hard to prepare the best learning experiences we can for our incoming QBOL FM residents and are really feeling energized now to push towards the finish line... or is that the start line ahead?

In addition, I'll share a link to our videotaped morning presentations in case you wanted to relive the drama of the information sessions.  Otherwise, feel free to contact me and we would be happy to send you some of our materials (e.g. PDFs of the slide presentation or a copy of our Colourful Curriculum Calendar), get you in touch with some of our community contacts, or answer any further questions you might have.

It was truly a pleasure to have the chance to meet with so many great candidates, to hear about the variety of paths you've taken to FM, and to learn about the many strengths that you already have to share with us - not just us at the QBOL site, but as future colleagues in FM.

CaRMS interviews at the halfway mark.

Just home from two days of interviewing candidates for our first cohort of QBOL residents and came away extremely impressed. There were many strong candidates with a definite interest in Family Medicine that would be a great fit with our site. Almost makes me wish we had more spots... Almost. "Eight is enough" for our first year.

I hope the people whom we have interviewed so far found the experience useful, fair, and not-too-intimidating. There certainly was a lot of information presented (even taking into account the technical difficulty I had the second morning's presentation - always check the plug!).

I also hope everybody involved with the interviews over the last 2 days had safe and smooth travels on their way home from Kingston; I noticed some black ice on the highway near Newtonville.

CaRMS Interviews start next week!

We are getting pretty excited as we prepare to go through the CaRMS interview process over the next two weeks.  This will obviously be the first time for our site and it takes us one big step closer to finding out who our first batch of residents will be!

As I am preparing a small presentation for the interview days, I thought this would be a good time to see if anybody had any thoughts or questions for us.

• If you are considering the QBOL site as an applicant, do you have any questions that we can address for you to help you make your decision?  
• If you currently live in Durham or are participating in QBOL, what do you see as the positives of our location and/or program?

Feel free to comment below or just e-mail me.