Promoting a Sufficient Family Medicine Workforce
A comprehensive Family Medicine Career Development Program and other strategies will be implemented to recruit and train a culturally diverse family physician workforce that meets the needs of the evolving US population for integrated health care for whole people, families and communities. Departments of family medicine will continue to develop, implement, disseminate and evaluate best practices in expanding student interest in the specialty.
Implementation Update (January 2005): To accomplish the objectives of this FFM Strategic Initiative, programming at STFM meetings will be developed to address FFM issues, particularly with respect to faculty development. STFM will incorporate FFM into the four major STFM meetings for 2005. As of December 2004, plans include the following:
- Pre-conferences at both the 2005 Predoctoral Education Conference and the 2005 STFM Annual Spring Conference. Twenty-one presentations at the Predoctoral Education Conference directly address this strategic objective. Fourteen at the STFM annual meeting address the enhancement of the family physician workforce.
- Plenary addresses at each of these meetings, and the Family Conference, to address elements of FFM recommendations.
- A special session at the annual meeting utilizing Bishop Fellows to address what strategies, skills, etc. would be helpful to chairs in dealing with deans and the wider academic health center community whose support and possibly funding are necessary to move FFM from concept to reality.
In addition, the development of a family medicine online curricular resource library through a grant from the National Library of Medicine will be pursued. This will provide opportunities for curricula and other pedagogic materials to be hosted on the Web, with the addition of an evaluation component, so that best practices can be identified as such and made available to the family medicine community.
The new STFM Group on Admissions will be encouraged to work with the AAMC and the AAFP to identify strategies being used in various institutions that have successfully identified and developed a diverse body of trainees.