Teaching family medicine.

Over the past year, Residents’ Pages have presented several articles devoted to career choice. As family medicine (FM) residents, we often interact with medical students. Many of us are likely to become clinical teachers in the near future. Most of us are concerned with the recent Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS) statistics and impending exacerbation of family physician shortages in Canada. Consequently, I and my colleagues have found ourselves spouting the virtues of family medicine: clinical variety, freedom to choose where and how one practises medicine, and many other joys and challenges. It is diffi cult, however, to connect our experiences as residents to those we had as medical students. During 2 years of residency, we have time to establish relationships with “our” clinic patients to provide continuity of care. As medical students, we were 4week guests in another physician’s practice, dependent on chart notes to provide an introduction, and not infrequently faced with patients who were resentful at seeing us before “their” doctors. Unfortunately, one of the most rewarding aspects of FM, continuity of care, disappeared from patient encounters in medical school. Is this loss avoidable? In this month’s Residents’ Page, Dr Wong offers his perspective on undergraduate medical education and the importance of physician-patient relationships in teaching FM, along with strategies to improve students’ clinical encounters.