A set of principles, developed by residents, to guide Canadian residency education.

With so much invested in the clinical competency of physicians, adequate and appropriate mechanisms are needed to ensure that educational systems provide the highest-quality training possible and are responsive both to the changing demands of the patient population and to changing technologies and research. After a literature review, the authors concluded that there are no established criteria or principles, from a learners' perspective, that set out goals for the delivery and evaluation in Canada of quality postgraduate medical education. The authors initiated the process of developing a set of principles of medical education based on residents' perspectives by compiling a list of issues and concepts that were felt to be important to creating the "ideal" postgraduate medical education system. This list of issues was divided into broad categories before presentation by the authors for Canada-wide discussion, reflection, and further refinement of concepts and issues across a nine-month period. The process eventually resulted in the final consensus-driven and iterative development of the main categories and the final principles that were adopted by the Canadian Association of Internes and Residents (CAIR). The authors present this set of principles and propose that they be used as a template to guide postgraduate medical education and against which changes to the system can be evaluated. CAIR will use these principles in a number of ways, including evaluation, education, and quality assurance.