Shaping GME: Evidence based approach to family medicine residency requirements.

Abstract

<h3>Context:</h3> The family of family medicine has been deeply engaged in a process to re-envision the future of family medicine residency training. The ACGME is supporting an extensive revision process of the residency program requirements. <h3>Objective:</h3> The timeline and process for program requirement major revisions will be presented, along with defined key attributes of family physicians of the future and key educational strategies for residency training. <h3>Study Design:</h3> The ACGME engaged in scenario planning using four widely varied, plausible, internally consistent scenarios describing the range of the future context for health care delivery. The process resulted in a summary of general insights about the practice of medicine in the future, followed by key insights about the family physician in 2050 that worked well and were viable regardless of scenario. <h3>Setting or Dataset:</h3> All scenario planning occurred virtually given the ongoing pandemic, which facilitated widespread involvement from a variety of professional communities. <h3>Population studied:</h3> The scenario planning involved 40 participants representing the family medicine community, other specialties, and related fields including behavioral health, population health, and patient advocates. <h3>Intervention/Instrument (for interventional studies):</h3> Separately, the Family Medicine community led by the ABFM and AAFP convened a summit in December 2020 (Starfield Summit IV: Re-envisioning Family Medicine Residency Education) to examine core questions critical to planning the future of Family Medicine Residency Education. This summit was accompanied by background briefs, serving as informal literature reviews on the same topics. <h3>Outcome Measures:</h3> The primary outcome was to inform the ACGME Family Medicine writing group in the extensive revision process of the residency program requirements. <h3>Results:</h3> Several themes emerged from the scenario planning that provide insights into the family physician of the future and their practice. These highlighted the importance of comprehensive clinical care, population health care, relationship-based communication, team-based leadership, adaptive lifelong learning, values-based professionalism, and technology. <h3>Conclusions:</h3> It is recognized that the family physician of the future will not achieve full mastery of all of these competencies during residency alone, but residency must serve as the foundation for career long professional development and adaptation.