Get Involved
Physician participation in the MD Program is critical to the delivery of our curriculum and community volunteers support our students in becoming skilled, caring, and compassionate physicians.
Educators
If you are a physician and interested in teaching in the MD Program, please complete the Educator Intake Form. You will be asked to provide information about your credentials and position at the university, which will allow us to evaluate your qualifications for specific teaching opportunities. If you meet the qualifications, you will gain access to the Educator Teaching Opportunities, where you can view the details of each teaching session and sign up for available opportunities.
If you have any questions please contact:
Melissa Coumont
Curriculum Team Lead
ume.recruitment@ualberta.ca
Volunteers
Our MD Program thrives on the invaluable contributions of community volunteers, who play a vital role in transforming our students into skilled, caring and passionate practitioners.
The MD Program at the University of Alberta values the support we receive from members of the community. Community support for our volunteer opportunities allows our medical students to work towards their full potential as skilled practitioners.
At different times of the year, there may be opportunities for community members to volunteer in the MD Program.
Patient Immersion Experience
The MD Program is recruiting for a program called Patient Immersion Experience. In this program, individuals living with a chronic medical condition or disability mentor medical students. These individuals should have regular contact with the health care system and should live within 40 km of the U of A.
The program allows medical students the valuable opportunity to learn from the patients that they will one day treat. These mentors provide our medical students with a better understanding of the experience of living with illness and disability, which will in turn help improve patient care.
The program begins in the fall each year and requires five or six mentor/mentee visits. These visits are meant to be in-person, though online visits can be arranged at the discretion of the mentor.
If you feel that you or someone you know is right for this program, sign up or reach out to us at patient.immersion.experience@ualberta.ca with any questions you may have.
PIE Interpretive Project Virtual Exhibition
Share Your Story
The MD Program is dedicated to providing comprehensive and in-depth 2SLGBTQIA+ education. We understand the importance of hearing the lived experiences of our community and are recruiting participants to tell us about their experiences. The Share Your Story event gives students the opportunity to learn about how 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals experience the healthcare system through first-hand stories and lived experiences.
If you would like to share your story with our students, sign up at bit.ly/md-your-story or contact us with further questions at yourstory@ualberta.ca.
Standardized Patient Program
Standardized patients (SPs) play an important role in health sciences education across all disciplines. A standardized patient is a person who has been trained to accurately and consistently portray an actual patient at a particular point in time; the SP presents with the patient's history, personality, physical finding, emotional structure and response pattern.
Why not just use actual patients? While actual patients are sometimes used for training, their changing health status makes them unsuitable for situations that require objectivity and consistency. By using trained SPs, we can ensure that each student encounters the same “patient,” allowing for more consistency in training, learning and assessment.