Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Health care is in crisis. Provinces are looking towards reinvigorating the system by creating a new influx of healthcare practitioners by a variety of means. .Provinces will be doing so by creating new healthcare training opportunities, including opening new medical schools. This provides a unique opportunity to capitalize on creating an institution with the pillars of providing community-centric primary care and the social determinants of health, providing culturally respectful care to diverse communities, using innovation and technology to improve quality of care and patient outcomes, providing support for the health and wellbeing of seniors as our population becomes older, equipping physicians with the skills to develop interprofessional health care networks to achieve better outcomes for patients embedded into its foundation. Using a Cambridge conference paradigm, we will bring together those who are within current systems such as learners, administrators, health care professionals, patients and educators to help us think through needs to safely monitor for bias and discrimination based upon social identity within our education and assessment systems. Crucially, it would be important for us to think through with our invited participants to examine issues around governance, data sovereignty, privacy, patient centered outcomes and and other systemic issues before we launch our school of medicine. By bringing together some of the best scientific minds, evaluation specialists, and thought leaders in Canada, we hope to be able to develop a roadmap for how medical schools might seek to evaluate their outcomes. Bearing in mind that there are likely 4 to 6 new medical schools that will be starting up in the next few years, it will be imperative for such work to be done in order to facilitate meaningful systems change throughout healthcare and medical education.