Queen’s Family Medicine Residency

Welcome to Queen’s Family Medicine! I am proud to share some key information about our award-winning Family Medicine residency training program.

For many years, we have proudly affirmed our motto: Train at Queen’s. Work Anywhere. This is as true today as it has ever been.

Residents at our four core sites of KTI (Kingston-Thousand-Islands), BQ (Belleville-Quinte), QBOL (Queen’s-Bowmanville-Oshawa-Lakeridge) and PK (Peterborough-Kawartha) have access to more than 85 additional training locations spanning across southern Ontario, as far north as James Bay and as far south as the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Such diversity in training locations allows each resident to customize their clinical experiences to not only attain overall family medicine competency, but to meet their own unique needs for specific or focused skills required for their anticipated practice community. We recognize that each resident has their own learning goals and benefits from customized clinical experiences and scheduling to achieve those objectives. This individualization is met within the primary context of every graduate requiring competency in all family medicine realms.

With many available choices, and to help guide our residents through their postgraduate journey, each resident is assigned an academic advisor who will meet with them at least three times annually to review progress, needs, plans, and wellness.

No doubt this comprehensive programming is a major factor in our program twice earning the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada’s annual Keith Award, which recognizes excellence in producing rural doctors.

As a very early adopter of the CFPC Triple C curriculum, Queen’s Family Medicine has more than 15 years of experience in Competency Based Medical Education (CBME). Residents get frequent feedback from supervising physicians to help refine skills and address areas for improvement. There is a focus on a growth-mindset to prepare graduates for lifelong learning and to achieve our Train at Queen’s, Work Anywhere goal.

A strength of Queen’s Family Medicine is a solid dedication to ongoing program improvement. Our robust, multi-layered program evaluation and quality-improvement process continually informs adaptation and innovation of our curriculum, clinical experiences, assessment, and wellness approaches. Resident input and voices are valued and integrated in all areas of program development and leadership. Our resident-driven initiatives such as our Nightmares-FM course, POCUS, UGME teaching and mentoring, and many others have allowed our program to evolve and continuously improve.

It is resident voices that have resulted in Queen’s Family Medicine twice earning the Professional Association of Residents of Ontario (PARO) Residency Program Excellence Award, making us the only residency program in Ontario to win this provincial recognition more than once. Further, we are the only family medicine program in the province to receive this award in its history. In addition to our two wins, we have been nominated for this award in seven other years, from 2012 to 2022 inclusive.

At Queen’s Family Medicine, we have prioritized wellness initiatives to support you during your postgraduate training. Our faculty is exceptionally dedicated to our program and, more specifically, to our residents. Our Resident Wellness and Resilience sub-committee, comprising residents from each of our sites, faculty members and staff, reports directly to the program leadership. In addition, Queen’s Postgraduate Medical Education (PGME) offers Wellness supports through their physician directors and free counselling services for all postgraduate residents.

I hope this gives you a sense of our award-winning Queen’s Family Medicine residency program, our culture, and our priorities. Please reach out with questions and best of luck with your CaRMS process.

Yours truly,

Dr. Kim Curtin
Postgraduate Program Director, Queen’s Family Medicine
kim.curtin@queensu.ca