Exploring the hidden curriculum of family medicine in undergraduate medical education

With Canada’s primary healthcare system in crisis, there is increasing emphasis on enhancing undergraduate medical education (UGME) to improve how family medicine is perceived and experienced by medical learners and physicians across the healthcare system. Undergraduate medical curricula play a critical role in shaping medical student values, and have the potential to valorize comprehensive continuity-based family practice. However, there are widespread anecdotal reports that family medicine is undervalued in the explicit and implicit curriculum of medical school. In this multi-study program of research, Dr. Keyna Bracken, Dr. Lawrence Grierson, and several UGME and family medicine leaders investigate the portrayal of family medicine in McMaster University’s undergraduate medical curriculum. Study 1 involves a discourse analysis of the formal curricular materials. This phase of the research is currently underway and is highlighting numerous ways that family medicine is avowed and undervalued in tutorial cases, lecture materials, and curricular structures. Study 2, beginning this spring, involves observations in classroom and clinical settings, which will offer nuance to the understanding gleaned from Study 1. Study 3 will follow, using qualitative interviews to explore student and recent graduate perceptions of the implicit curricular messaging about family medicine.