School granted “new program status” by the College of Family Physicians of Canada

Date Published | April 20, 2007

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) has succeeded in recruiting a strong contingent of residents in its first year of assuming responsibility for postgraduate placements and program delivery.

“There was a lot of hard work done by a lot of people to promote the program,” said Dr. Maureen Topps, associate dean of postgraduate medical education. “We have excellent residents currently in our programs and it’s really the residents who sell the program to the incoming students. If they’re having a good training experience and enjoying the lifestyle and the balance that the North provides, they’ll spread the word.”

Graduating medical students across Canada have several weeks blocked off every January and February to visit postgraduate program sites and decide where to complete their training. Interviews are conducted and both the students and school recruiters rank each other.

The rankings, or preferences, are submitted to the Canadian Residency Matching Service, fed into a computer “and out come the results as to who has been matched to which program,” explained Topps.

In the first of the two-phase matching process, 22 students were matched to NOSM’s family medicine program, leaving 10 positions open for the second phase of the process. Of the 49 postgraduate positions in the North, 32 are for the family medicine program and 17 for specialty programs. (The total number of positions filled was decided April 13th, too late to be included in this issue – ed.)

The residency programs begin in July.

“Postgraduate family medicine programs struggle right across the country to fill positions and rural programs struggle even more, so we have actually done very well,” said Topps.

“We hope that as our medical students begin graduating (in 2009) that a large number of them will choose to stay and train in the North, but we also like to see students come and join us from other schools.”

NOSM has been granted “new program status” by the College of Family Physicians of Canada for both the Family Medicine and Family Medicine Advanced Skills programs.

Specialty residency programs in anesthesiology, pediatrics, psychiatry, internal medicine, general surgery and orthopedic surgery are offered through Ottawa University and McMaster, but are administered by NOSM.

Residents in the specialty programs will spend approximately 40 per cent of their time in Northern communities and the balance of their time in either Hamilton or Ottawa. NOSM is proceeding with plans to seek accreditation for its specialty programs, but will continue to rely on the University of Ottawa and McMaster University to assist with program delivery.

Residents serving in the northwest will be based in Thunder Bay, while those in the northeast will be matched to Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins or North Bay. All of them will do rotations in rural and remote communities. The duration of residency programs is two years for family medicine, three years for family medicine advanced skills and between four and five years for specialty programs.

“It’s a great opportunity for the communities to market themselves because in a few years these residents will be deciding where they want to live and work,” said Topps.

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