Longitudinal Themes

Longitudinal Themes is a comprehensive course for physician development that covers a wide range of themes to help medical students develop specific CanMEDS roles under the CanMEDS framework .

Many of these themes run alongside pre-clerkship and clerkship courses and complement and integrate with concepts taught throughout all four years of medical school.

Course Themes

Communication

Introduction to the fundamentals of history taking where small groups of students work with a Family Medicine physician or resident to perform peer-to-peer history taking. Cases align with course content (e.g. cardiology cases during the cardiovascular course) and include advanced concepts such as error disclosure, conflict negotiation and motivational interviewing.

Physical Exam

Introduction to the fundamentals of physical exam where key content is taught through hands-on learning with an emphasis on rational, evidence-based clinical examination.

Longitudinal Clinical Experience (LCE)

Students spend half-day clinics in pre-clerkship with a family physician.

Students in Service (SiS)

Students work with community agencies as part of a service-learning component of Longitudinal Themes to become health advocates.

Interprofessional Education (IPE)

Prepares students to function collaboratively on health care teams that include health professionals from other disciplines as they provide coordinated services to patients.

Patient Immersion Experience (PIE)

Matches pairs of medical students to a patient with a chronic illness or disability to explore the illness experience from a patient’s perspective.

Physician Discussion Group (PDG)

Spans all four years of the curriculum and aims to integrate learning and reflection from all the other Longitudinal Themes to form the physician identity.

Additional themes such as ethics, evidence-based medicine (EBM), social accountability and patient safety are integrated throughout Year 1 and 2 systems-based courses.

CanMEDS framework

The four-year Longitudinal Themes curriculum follows the CanMEDS framework. Each theme aligns with one or more of the CanMEDS roles: