Why Prospective Bereavement Counseling Is Crucial for Peace-Finding After Loss.

Bereavement counseling is often offered as a referral following an adverse event or after identification of lingering grief. This article proposes the value of prospective bereavement counseling when a person can reasonably anticipate loss to support anticipatory grief and facilitate supportive continuous care planning for patients experiencing loss. This article positions bereavement counseling as care aimed at finding peace by offering a framework of dimensions of peace, opportunities to foster peace in clinically important moments, and guiding questions to facilitate this clinical outcome in health care settings.

Artificial intelligence for family medicine research in Canada: current state and future directions: Report of the CFPC AI Working Group.

Objective: To understand the current landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) for family medicine (FM) research in Canada, identify how the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) could support near-term positive progress in this field, and strengthen the community working in this field.

Composition Of The Committee: Members of a scientific planning committee provided guidance alongside members of a CFPC staff advisory committee, led by the CFPC-AMS TechForward Fellow and including CFPC, FM, and AI leaders.

Methods: This initiative included 2 projects.

Models of shared care for the management of psychotic disorder after first diagnosis in Ontario.

Objective: To describe the provision of care for young people following first diagnosis of psychotic disorder.

Design: Retrospective cohort study using health administrative data.

Setting: Ontario.

International medical graduates' experiences with caring for cross-cultural patient populations: Qualitative study in Alberta.

Objective: To explore experiences of international medical graduate (IMG) FPs in providing cross-cultural patient care and to identify rewards and challenges they experienced when caring for patients of cultural backgrounds different from their own.

Design: Descriptive qualitative study.

Setting: Family medicine primary care practices in Alberta.

An Approach to Leadership Development and Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Education in the Context of Professional Identity Formation in Pre-Clinical Medical Students.

Objectives: Leadership and patient safety and quality improvement (PSQI) are recognized as essential parts of a physician's role and identity, which are important for residency training. Providing adequate opportunities for undergraduate medical students to learn skills related to these areas, and their importance, is challenging.

Methods: The Western University Professional Identity Course (WUPIC) was introduced to develop leadership and PSQI skills in second-year medical students while also aiming to instill these topics into their identities.

Natural history of abdominal pain in family practice: Longitudinal study of electronic medical record data in southwestern Ontario.

Objective: To examine the frequency, natural history, and outcomes of 3 subtypes of abdominal pain (general abdominal pain, epigastric pain, localized abdominal pain) among patients visiting Canadian family practices.

Design: Retrospective cohort study with a 4-year longitudinal analysis.

Setting: Southwestern Ontario.

Snapshot of family medicine around the world: Introducing the global family medicine website.

Objective: To develop an interactive, living map of family medicine training and practice; and to appreciate the role of family medicine within, and its effect on, health systems across the world.

Composition Of The Committee: A subgroup of the College of Family Physicians of Canada's Besrour Centre for Global Family Medicine developed connections with selected international colleagues with expertise in international family medicine practice and teaching, health systems, and capacity building to map family medicine globally. In 2022, this group received support from the Foundation for Advancing Family Medicine's Trailblazers initiative to advance this work.

Adapting Our SCOPE: Lessons Learned from Spreading and Scaling Efforts to Integrate Care.

SCOPE (Seamless Care Optimizing the Patient Experience) launched in 2012 to support primary care in downtown Toronto with live navigation and rapid access to acute and community care resources for primary care providers (PCPs) and their patients. Ten years later, over 1,800 PCPs across Ontario have signed up for SCOPE and over 48,000 interactions in the form of e-mail, fax, phone and secure messaging have been conducted. Case examples illustrate the ways in which SCOPE has been adapted across a range of Ontario Health Teams, including under-resourced, small urban and rural sites.

Improving Family Presence in Long-Term Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Family caregivers play a vital role in supporting the physical and mental health of long-term care (LTC) residents. Due to LTC visitor restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, residents (as well as family caregivers) showed significant adverse health outcomes due to a lack of family presence. To respond to these outcomes, eight implementation science teams led research projects in conjunction with Canadian LTC homes to promote the implementation of interventions to improve family presence.

Abdominal aortic aneurysm screening in an academic family practice: Short-term impact of guideline changes.

Objective: To investigate abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) screening rates in the 6 months before and after the introduction of updated Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) guidelines to determine effects on practice patterns, as well as to determine whether certain patient characteristics impact AAA screening rates.

Design: Retrospective chart review.

Setting: Academic family health centre in London, Ont.

Focused practice in family medicine: Quantitative study.

Objective: To determine factors associated with having a focused practice among a sample of family medicine graduates in Canada and to assess the characteristics of FPs with focused practices and the range of services provided by these FPs in relation to the full scope of office-based care.

Design: Secondary analyses of cross-sectional data from the 2013-2014 Western Family Medicine Resident Follow-Up Survey.

Setting: Western University in London, Ont.

Incidence of poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis in northwestern Ontario: Cross-sectional study at a tertiary care centre.

Objective: To measure the incidence of poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis (PSGN) and resulting complications in northwestern Ontario, including among Indigenous and rural populations.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Setting: As the only tertiary care hospital in northwestern Ontario, Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) functions as the primary referral centre for most of the region.

Partnering with Patients to Enhance Access to Kidney Transplantation and Living Kidney Donation.

Kidney transplantation gives many patients with kidney failure a longer and healthier life. Unfortunately, some transplant-eligible patients will never receive one. In this paper, we describe how patients and researchers collaborated on new strategies and programs to enhance access to kidney transplantation and living kidney donation.

Consensus statement on networks for high-quality rural anesthesia, surgery, and obstetric care in Canada.

Objective: To describe the essential components of well-resourced and high-functioning multidisciplinary networks that support high-quality anesthesia, surgery, and maternity care for rural Canadians, delivered as close to home as possible.

Composition Of The Committee: A volunteer Writers' Group was drawn from the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, the Canadian Association of General Surgeons, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and the Association of Canadian University Departments of Anesthesia.

Methods: A collaborative effort over the past several years among the professional stakeholders has culminated in this consensus statement on networked care designed to integrate and support a specialist and non-specialist, urban and rural, anesthesia, surgery, and maternity work force into high-functioning networks based on the best available evidence.

Relapse of concussion symptoms in the context of premature return to learn and return to play: Comparative analysis of 2006 to 2011 and 2011 to 2016.

Objective: To determine whether the proportion of sport-related concussion (SRC) cases among student athletes that resulted in a relapse of their symptoms due to premature return to play (RTP) or premature return to learn (RTL) has changed compared with a prior (2006 to 2011) study.

Design: Retrospective cohort study of electronic medical record charts from a 5-year period (2011 to 2016) compared with previous data.

Setting: A sport and exercise medicine physician's office-based practice in Ontario.