Department Highlights

Project Lead: Dr. Roshan Abraham
Project Active: 2019 - Present

Save Our Supply Antimicrobial Stewardship Podcast 

Canadian Association for Medical Education Health Professions Education (CAME HPE)

Podcasts date back to the “iPod” from which the term gets its moniker in combination with the word “broadcast,” and while the iPod itself might be obsolete, the podcast as a medium only relatively recently began to hit its stride. From news and culture, to sports, comedy, and true crime; there’s a podcast for everything. Fortunately for medical education professionals and potentials, their slice of the podcast world is growing too—even within our own department. Curricular podcasts are a new form of educational delivery for the MD program, offering opportunities to enrich the curriculum in regards to time limits and the introduction of content for a variety of settings.

Undergraduate Preclerkship Director Dr. Roshan Abraham set out to solve the lack of infrastructure for FoMD curricular podcasts. Since 2019 he has participated in several podcasts: writing, producing or co-hosting for Talk Doctor to Me with Dr. Sanja Kostov and the Family Medicine Interest Group’s GP2B. His two currently active projects—Save Our Supply Antimicrobial Stewardship (SOS AMS) and the Canadian Association for Medical Education Health Professions Education (CAME HPE)—serve different purposes in medical education.

SOS AMS is a curricular podcast presented in tandem with Script Concordance Testing (SCT) modules to residents and medical students rotating at the University of Alberta Hospital’s Internal Medicine Clinical Teaching Unit. This hybrid project has yielded promising data so far, as reassuring SCT learner scores follow the podcast’s number of downloads soaring past 1000 in under three months. Dr. Abraham says, “We are hoping to see how both the podcasts and SCT modules might improve clinical decision making in an often overlooked yet important topic in medicine.”

As more of an extracurricular podcast, the CAME HPE project focuses on Continuing Medical Education topics in Health Professions Education to “expand the reach of the organization and connect with academics from across the country.” The unique value of both these projects is their potential to establish Family Medicine as a leader in producing and featuring content propelling "curricular innovation at different levels in the learning spectrum."

Not only have opportunities to create curricular podcasts been expanded, but Dr. Abraham himself has through this process become an expert in Digital Content Creation, particularly where podcasting and livestreaming are concerned. He hopes to use his skills and experience '"to support others in their hopes of starting similar projects." Leading in this area, Dr. Abraham has observed some obvious opportunities in the Canadian medical education realm of podcasting:

"Given the infrastructure that has been developed around podcasting so far over the past few years in the FoMD, I think it would be great to start a podcast focused on the efforts of the DoFM by showcasing the people behind our department's research and education achievements. Not only could this help with raising the overall profile of the DoFM in the University and beyond, but it could also be helpful in attracting future members of the department and prospective residents as well." 

- Dr. Roshan Abraham

Project Lead: Dr. Jasneet Parmar
Research Coordinator: Dr. Sharon Anderson
Project Active: 2014 - Present

Caregiver-Centered Care Modules

In 2014, multidisciplinary stakeholders from across Alberta gathered in Edmonton to discuss support for family caregivers. Physicians Dr. Jasneet Parmar and Dr. Jayna Holyroyd-Leduc, along with occupational therapist Dr. Suzette Bremault-Phillips, sought to gain insight into the mounting distress they noticed among their patients’ caregivers. Held at Lister Hall, this preliminary consultation attracted nearly three times the number of expected participants with 130 stakeholders in attendance. Resulting from this event and its follow-up consultations in 2016 and 2017: the recommendation “that healthcare providers be trained to support family caregivers.”

As Lead Investigator for the project, Dr. Parmar knew the identification of competencies was the first step in the development of what would become the Caregiver-Centered Care Health Workforce Education. 2018 saw multidisciplinary stakeholders highlight 6 competency domains. Using a Modified Delphi Process, Dr. Parmar, Research Coordinator Dr. Sharon Anderson, and their collaborators identified the competency indicators to “validate the Caregiver-Centered Care Competency Framework.”

Once the framework was validated, the team began “to develop three levels of competency-based education to educate the health workforce to provide person-centered care to family caregivers.” Work on the first level—which covers the 6 competency domains—commenced in November 2019, and a year later the Foundational Education went live online. Since launching, this first module alone has engaged nearly 5000 health providers. Click here to read the published evaluation.

The project pivoted to include a Covid-19 module to assist providers in supporting family caregivers at home through the effects of the pandemic, and the team is currently in the midst of evaluating their Advanced second level module. The team in question is a large collaboration, with over 140 people assisting with co-design. Dr. Wendy Duggleby, Dr. Lesley Charles, Dr. Suzette Bremault-Phillips, Dr. Cheryl Pollard and several family caregivers have been involved since the very beginning 9 years ago.

Healthcare Excellence Canada: Essential Together nationally recommends both the Foundational Education and Covid-19 modules, and Island Health recently requested to put them on their Health Learning System. The modules exemplify innovation bridging research and practice, and the Department of Family Medicine is proud to promote them.

"We think the Caregiver-Centered Care Education will help to change how Canadian caregivers are supported."

- Dr. Sharon Anderson