• Can Fam Physician · May 2023

    Snapshot of family medicine around the world: Introducing the global family medicine website.

    • Neil Arya, Michael Geurguis, Celine Vereecken-Smith, and David Ponka.
    • Family physician at and Founder and Director of the Centre for Family Medicine Refugee Health Clinic in Kitchener, Ont; Fellow at the Balsillie School for International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont; President of the PEGASUS (Peace, Global Health, Sustainability) Institute; Founding Director of the Office of Global Health at Western University in London, Ont; Scholar-in-Residence and Fellow at the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo; and Assistant Clinical Professor in Family Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
    • Can Fam Physician. 2023 May 1; 69 (5): 330336330-336.

    ObjectiveTo develop an interactive, living map of family medicine training and practice; and to appreciate the role of family medicine within, and its effect on, health systems across the world.Composition Of The CommitteeA subgroup of the College of Family Physicians of Canada's Besrour Centre for Global Family Medicine developed connections with selected international colleagues with expertise in international family medicine practice and teaching, health systems, and capacity building to map family medicine globally. In 2022, this group received support from the Foundation for Advancing Family Medicine's Trailblazers initiative to advance this work.MethodsIn 2018 groups of Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ont) students conducted broad searches of relevant articles about family medicine in different regions and countries around the world; they conducted focused interviews and then synthesized and verified information, developing a database of family medicine training and practice around the world. Outcome measures were age of family medicine training programs and duration and type of family medicine postgraduate training.ReportTo approach the question of how delivery of the family medicine model of primary care can affect health system performance, relevant data on family medicine were collated-the presence, nature, duration, and type of training and role within health care systems. The website https://www.globalfamilymedicine.org now has up-to-date country-level data on family medicine practice around the world. This publicly available information will allow such data to be correlated together with health system outputs and outcomes and will be updated as necessary through a wiki-type process. While Canada and the United States only have residency training, countries such as India have master's or fellowship programs, in part accounting for the complexity of the discipline. The maps also identify where family medicine training does not yet exist.ConclusionMapping family medicine around the world will allow researchers, policy makers, and health care workers to have an accurate picture of family medicine and its impact using relevant, up-to-date information. The group's next aim is to develop data on parameters by which performance in various domains can be measured across settings and to display these in an accessible form.Copyright © 2023 the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

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