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"Welcome! This is a place where stories about Canadian family medicine are shared by family physicians, patients, and their communities. These stories deliver powerful messages about the meaning of being a family physician, and about the contributions of family medicine and family physicians to the history of medicine, health care and life in Canada."

Families are an immense resource in the care, treatment and recovery of individuals with co-occurring mental health and addiction problems. However, they often have limited access to the resources, information and help that they need to be supportive to the ones they love. This six-week online course for health care providers explores the needs of families affected by concurrent disorders as well as the strategies that health care providers can use to empower families and ensure that their experiences are more positive. The recommended pre-requisite for this course is the Concurrent Disorders Core Course.

"COMFORT is an acronym that stands for the basic principles of palliative care communication and comprises seven modules (Communication, Orientation/Opportunity, Mindfulness, Family, Openings, Relating, Team). These communication skills training modules are designed to highlight interprofessional care and communication. Each module of the COMFORT curriculum can stand alone as a teaching activity or can be integrated into a new or existing course. Modules C (narrative clinical communication) and F (family caregivers) provide beginner level instruction, while M (mindfulness), O/O (orientation), and T (team) provide intermediate instruction and O (openings) and R (relating) provide advanced communication skills and are intended for learners who have clinical observation experience."

Fifty-five word stories are brief pieces of creative writing that use elements of poetry, prose, or both to encapsulate key experiences in health care. These stories have appeared in Family Medicine1 and JAMA2 and have been used to teach family medicine faculty development fellows.3 Writers and readers of 55-word stories gain insight into key moments of the healing arts; the brevity of the pieces adds to both the writing and reading impact. Fifty-five word stories may be used with trainees to stimulate personal reflection on key training experiences or may be used by individual practitioners as a tool for professional growth.

"A simple intervention resulted in improvement in staff confidence, as well as in multiple measures of family satisfaction with communication. This intervention is easily reproduced."

"The ACORN Project is an Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) Learning project of the New Hanover Regional Medical Center Residency in Family Medicine. "

Healthtalkonline is the award-winning website of the DIPEx charity and replaces the website formerly at dipex.org. Healthtalkonline lets you share in other people's experiences of health and illness. You can watch or listen to videos of the interviews, read about people's experiences and find reliable information about conditions, treatment choices and support. The information on Healthtalkonline is based on qualitative research into patient experiences, led by experts at the University of Oxford. These personal stories of health and illness will enable patients, families and healthcare professionals to benefit from the experiences of others

"All adults were asked which group is more helpful when they need certain types of information or support: health professionals like doctors and nurses or peers like fellow patients, friends, and family."

"We found that optimal teamwork was perceived to be dependent on good leadership and availability of experienced staff. The participants described a good leader as one who verbally declares being the leader, communicates clear objectives, and allocates critical tasks, including communication with patients or their family, to suitable individual members"

A Doctor-Professor answers the old question "What is the single best thing we can do for our health" in a completely new way. Dr. Mike Evans is founder of the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a staff physician at St. Michael's

The "hidden curriculum" refers to medical education as more than simple transmission of knowledge and skills; it is also a socialization process. Wittingly or unwittingly, norms and values transmitted to future physicians often undermine the formal messages of the declared curriculum. The hidden curriculum consists of what is implicitly taught by example day to day, not the explicit teaching of lectures, grand rounds, and seminars. I am increasingly aware of how those of us engaged in family medicine education are blind to it.

"The principles, developed by a committee of nurse leaders and patient advocates, are meant to guide the provider community in developing patient engagement models and quality and safety interventions that support and encourage the patient and family to become partners in their care. The development of the principles, and the organization, is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation."

"Specialty-dependent differences exist in consult preferences of physicians. These differences vary from the extremes of orthopedic surgeons desiring a comprehensive co-management approach with the consultant to general internists and family medicine physicians desiring to retain control over order writing and have a more focused consultant approach."

"Growing up in a family run care home, Andy Bradley discusses how his experiences with the elderly have helped him to better understand how we can provide compassionate care within our institutions."

MedU is the home to CLIPP - Computer-assisted Learning in Pediatrics Program, SIMPLE - Simulated Internal Medicine Patient Learning Experience, fmCASES - Family Medicine Computer-Assisted Simulations for Educating Students, and WISE-MD - Web Initiative for Surgical Education of Medical Doctors.

"The focus of this Toolkit is on creating written material intended for use by people eligible for or enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children's Health Insurance Program -- and by people who serve or assist them, such as family members and friends, outreach workers, agency staff, community organizations, and care providers. While the guidelines and advice we offer are geared to the needs of CMS audiences, most of them reflect general principles for effective communication of information that can be applied to any audience."

Caroline Wellbery, MD; Reid GoochFrom the Department of Family Medicine,Georgetown University. Background to "Interacting with the Medical Humanities"

Every 24 hours, MDLinx scans 1200 leading journals across 30 medical specialties and professions and summarizes and filters the articles so you'll see just what is important in your areas of interest

"It is important that the clinical teacher teaches trainees the specific skills sets of the expert general practitioner (e.g. synthesising skills, recognising prototypes, focusing on cues and clues, using community resources and dealing with uncertainty) in order to promote clinical reasoning in the context of general practice or family medicine. Clinical teachers need to understand their own reasoning processes as well as be able to convey that knowledge to their trainees. They also need to understand the developmental stages of clinical reasoning and be able to nurture each trainee's own expertise. Strategies for facilitating effective clinical reasoning in trainees include adequate exposure to patients, offering the trainees opportunity for reflection and feedback, and coaching on the techniques of reasoning in the general practice context."