About the Course

Background

Family medicine is a subject that provides comprehensive care to individual families & communities by integrating biomedical, behavioural & the social sciences.

“There are 57 different specialists to diagnose and treat 57 different varieties of diseases, but no physician to take care of the patient”–so very aptly said by one physician, when asked to comment on the decline in the number of family doctors.Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization endorses Primary care as our best hope for the future. Family doctors are our “Rising stars for the future”Expert Physicians with rich clinical experience across India were invited to develop the course.

Addressing the felt need

The 1 year fellowship course in family medicine has been developed to cater to just such felt need. The course focuses on building the knowledge of primary care physicians and on enhancing their skills; not merely awarding certificates. Given the busy schedules of practitioners and high drop-out rates in distance and online education, the course is so structured and the content so developed as to keep it self-motivating, comfortably paced and practice-relevant, thus sustaining student interest throughout until successful completion of the learning.

Course Objectives

The objective of this focused learning is to empower, enrich and upgrade general physicians (who come from diverse rural to semi-urban back grounds): with the latest subject material, with clinical expertise and skills, with practice guidelines and procedures; and guidance in dealing effectively with all kinds of patient presentations and complications. At the end of the Course the learner will be able to :

*Screen for and Diagnose most commonly occurring diseases in a day to day practise in the early stages.

*Treat the disease with professional competence so as to prevent and retard its progression and complications.

*Educate and counsel patient & family on prevention of various diseases and its progression.

Pedagogy

The learners’ profile requires the content to flow in an intuitive way so any general physician or science graduate with a minimal computer knowledge can negotiate the Course with ease.

Our curriculum design is therefore matched to a third-world practice context, yet incorporating evidence-based medical practice norms set to global standards.

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Career Prospects

Course Design: Blended learning.

There will be a weekly roll out of Audio-visual lessons and two-monthly clinical/ practical/skill postings.

The content compiled reflects the broad core of knowledge required by a family physician.

Inputs from other experienced specialists were taken for relevant areas of learning.

The course progresses from easy to difficult: first covering the daily-encountered cases, building up complexity gradually toward the critical cases (emergency/complicated/co-morbid).

The course ends with recent advances related to the subject, and gives the learners insights into current trends and future prospects in the field

Recommended Background / Entry Requirements

Target learner group

• MBBS Graduates. ( Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery)
• General Practitioners wishing to improve their credentials & thereby get better  Family Medicine physicians
• Other Health care professionals looking to update and review the essentials of Primary care
• Doctors who could not pursue higher education for whatever reason.
• Doctors who are so busy with their practice that they do not find time to attend continuous medical education

Course Syllabus

Course Delivery Format

Online components delivered through the SmarTeach Learning Platform with access to

• Online lectures delivered by experts in respective fields. The students can view the lecture any number of times.
• Included in these lectures are hundreds of text slides, illustrations and appropriate  animations, audios and videos to make concepts easy to understand.
• Reading material including prescribed Text book and e-Books for each chapter; additional reading material would also be suggested through links.
• Facility for the student to bookmark specific segments of a running lecture and ability to add your own notes for later review.
• Case based discussions [CbD], where you will be expected to select 2 specific cases during the period of compulsory clinical rotation under the guidance of in-house clinician and ensure completeness of the Logbook for the cases decided.

Certification

After successful completion of the course the student shall be issued a Certificate of Fellowship in Family Medicine.

Assessment

Assignments

• Students should maintain log books for the patients assessed.
• They should then give a structured case study presentation
• This will become part of the Formative Evaluation.

Assessments

• Formative Evaluation and Summative Evaluation.
• Theory Final exams-(120 questions, 2 hours, MCQ format)
• Practical Final exam(100 MCQ Questions, Clinical vignettes)
• Monthly assessments and log books are part of formative assessment and constitute 60% of final score, the balance 40% weight-age being covered by the final objective type
• All assessments are evaluated by an experienced faculty.
• Monthly self-assessment through multiple choice questions from a question bank across all subject areas

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Suggested Reading

• Text Book of Family Medicine by Dr. Arulrhaj

Links to Share

• “The rising importance of family medicine” by Dr Margaret Chan (Director-General of the World Health Organization)