Teaching the Triple C curriculum.

The implementation of the College of Family Physicians of Canada’s Triple C Competency-based Curriculum is creating exciting changes in how to best teach family medicine residents.1,2 The impetus to redesign residency training comes from a number of fronts. Family physicians are managing sicker patients than in the past. The knowledge needed to practise safe, effective medicine is rapidly expanding. The time to train a family physician is short—just 2 years. Training methods must therefore be effective and efficient. In addition there is an international move toward competencybased medical education. This makes sense—residency training is no longer primarily time based. To graduate, residents must now demonstrate their competence in the roles, knowledge, skills, and attitudes believed to be critical to being a good family physician. The Triple C Competency-based Curriculum supports development of just such a physician. It is comprehensive training producing physicians with a range of skills who are able to work in any setting.3 It has continuity built in—continuity of patient care so residents learn how to establish effective long-term therapeutic relationships, continuity of curriculum with the deliberate layering-on of increasingly sophisticated approaches to patient issues, and continuity of supervision to form the foundation for good role modeling and reliable assessment of competency.4 It is family medicine–centred. Learning, where possible, is done in the family medicine setting, based on the educational theory that learning is most effective if done in the context in which the knowledge will be used.1,5 Teaching is done by family physicians or family medicine–knowledgeable specialists, allowing for role modeling and relevant teaching.