Research Program Overview
The FSG Medical Education Research program is grounded in the foundational idea that education matters. From this perspective, the FSG Med Ed Lab pursues studies that aim to emphasize, elucidate, and improve the relationship between health professional training and the healthcare delivered to patients and communities. FSG stands for full-scope generalist. We take on this moniker for two reasons. First, situated in a Department of Family Medicine, much of our research considers the education antecedents that support the effective practice of comprehensive, continuous, and community-adaptive primary care family medicine. Secondly, given the breadth of education issues in the health professions, we recognize a need to embrace generalism in our approach to research inquiry, adopting a pragmatic epistemological lens and developing collective expertise in a wide range of research methods, methodologies, and designs.
Research Program Pillars
Education for Family Medicine
Investigations of education policies and practices for improving access and delivery of comprehensive primary care family medicine.
Conceptualizing Merit
Research on the relationships between admissions policies, programmatic assessment, the outcomes of training, and conceptualizations of merit in health professional training
Bigger Education Data
Work that explores and enhances our collective capacity for inter-institutional data-driven medical education research.
Precision Skill Acquisition
Studies on human motor control and the training, acquisition, and assessment of precision technical skills in medicine and other disciplines.
Projects
Grassroots Patient Medical Home Study
Investigators: Lawrence Grierson, Michelle Howard, David Price, Jose Francois, Alan Katz, Asiana Elma
Program Pillar(s): Education for Family Medicine
Description: There are loud pan-Canadian calls for greater uptake of the Patient’s Medical Home vision for primary care, a set of policy recommendations spanning the implementation of remuneration structures that better incentivize continuity-based and community-adaptive family medicine and increased development of interdisciplinary healthcare teams that support family physicians in caring for more patients across a fuller practice scope. This research focuses on understanding the processes and features that support the grassroots development of family medicine practices that embody key PMH features with the goal of generating evidence that informs prospective advocacy efforts, education reform, and policy decisions
Funding: College of Family Physicians of Canada
The Social Innovation of Medical School Admissions
Investigators: Lawrence Grierson, Kulamakan Kulasegaram, Jean-Michel Leduc, Mark Hanson
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Program Pillar(s): Conceptualizing Merit
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Description: This research aims to catalogue the admissions adaptations that were considered and employed by medical schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during the initial March 2020 public health emergency, and over subsequent cycles. The goal of the research is to characterize the transformative impacts that these adaptations have had on the Canadian medical school admissions landscape and on aspiring physicians.
Moral Distress in Critical and Primary Care
Investigators: Monica Molinaro, Meredith Vanstone, Myles Leslie, Lawrence Grierson
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Program Pillar(s): Education for Family Medicine
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Description: This project explores the way moral systems were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact that this had on interprofessional teams of health care providers working in critical care and family medicine environments in Ontario and Alberta.
Funding: Canadian Institute of Health Research
Transitions of Care for Survivors of Childhood Cancer
Investigators: Trishana Nayiager, Stacey Marjerrison, Noah Ivers, Lawrence Grierson
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Program Pillar(s): Education for Family Medicine
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Description: This research aims to develop a validated conceptual framework of features that support the routine and follow-up care of adult survivors of childhood cancer in family physician community practice as defined by Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario models of survivorship care.
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Optimizing Health Information Exchange during Patient Transitions into Long-Term Care
Investigators: Augustine Okoh, Michelle Howard, Henry Siu, Ellen Badone, Lawrence Grierson
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Program Pillar(s): Education for Family Medicine
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Description: This project explores the prospect of a high-performance, transdisciplinary, interprofessional approach to the care of the elderly and aims to elucidate the educational antecedents and competencies that foster successful transdisciplinary practice.
Funding: Physicians' Services Incorporated Foundation; Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University
Family Medicine Hidden Curriculum
Investigators: Keyna Bracken, Lawrence Grierson, Cathy Risdon, Matthew Sibbald, Helen Neighbour, Sharon Bal, Sarah Kinzie, Meredith Vanstone
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Program Pillar(s): Education for Family Medicine
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Description: With the Canadian primary healthcare system in crisis, there are growing efforts to enhance training in a manner that supports improvement to how family medicine is perceived, experienced by family physicians, and engaged by all physicians in an interdependent healthcare system. One option that has been identified as appealing is to feature primary care more centrally and deeply in undergraduate training. However, currently, there is widespread speculation that the role of family medicine in the healthcare system is being systemically devalued through implicit and hidden aspects of medical school curricula. Accordingly, this research investigates if, where, and the degree to which this is happening, while also facilitating a better understanding of how curricular components are influencing student perceptions of the role of family medicine in the healthcare system.
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Funding: Family Medicine Associates of Hamilton
Poisoning the Pre-Matriculation Well: Effects of Admissions Policies on Aspiring Professional Student Wellbeing
Investigators: Lawrence Grierson, Stacey Ritz, Hartley Jafine, Lenore Lukasik-Foss, Natasja Menezes, Catharine Munn, Kathleen Nolan, Stacey Ritz, Mei-Ju Shih, Meredith Vanstone, Maria Hubinette, Jean-Michel Leduc, Alice Cavanagh
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Program Pillar(s): Conceptualizing Merit
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Description: Physicians and medical students are experiencing increasing rates of burnout, which is a phenomenon attributed in part to a hidden curriculum of health education, which tends to prioritize perseverance and stigmatize those who seek accommodation for adverse personal circumstances. This research considers an early upstream source of this relationship—the way medical school admissions policies impact aspiring medical students who experience adverse personal circumstances, and how these impacts bear relevance on medical learning and physician practice.
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Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Explainable AI for Clinical Technical Skills
Investigators: Lawrence Grierson, Aasa Feragan-Hauberg
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Program Pillar(s): Precision Skill Acquisition
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Description: The translation of medical AI from research to clinical practice is often hampered by lack of attention to actual clinical needs, and by AI solving only small parts of the diagnostic pipeline. This research aims to develop explainable AI support systems that improve clinicians’ learning, decision-making, and performance for complex clinical procedures. This work presents an opportunity to make an important contribution to efforts to improve the utility of AI in actual clinical practice.
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Mature Student Professional Identity Formation
Investigators: Lawrence Grierson, Catherine Tong, Rebekah Sibbald, Rod Parsa
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Program Pillar(s): Conceptualizing Merit
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Description: Professional identity formation (PIF) refers to the process through which the medical student is transformed from lay person to physician. However, PIF is consistently studied within a very linear path to medicine, which spans pre-medical training, undergraduate medical training, residency, and ultimately within independent practice. Limited research has studied PIF for students with different matriculation trajectories. Thus, this research seeks to identify and characterize major themes in PIF in medical students with significant prior work history, and determine how medical schools might better support the PIF of these students.​