The Discipline of Family Medicine has moved to a new streams-based residency model in response to some medical students’ hesitancy to follow the traditional method of internal matching.

Instead, students can now rank their placement preference – a move that is already producing positive results.

“In previous years, we’ve been told that candidates didn’t apply to our program because they could not be guaranteed to train in their chosen location,” said Dr. Danielle O’Keefe, postgraduate program director. “By introducing the streams model, candidates can now rank their stream preferences in the Canadian Resident Matching Service.”

The Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS) is an organization that provides a matching service to medical students for entry into postgraduate medical training throughout Canada.

For example, if a candidate would like to go to the Northern-Goose Bay stream in Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador, they can now rank that program at the top of their rankings list using the new streams model.

The Discipline of Family Medicine CaRMS sessions ran Jan. 21-23. The streams model wasn’t the only new item on the agenda this year – the discipline also introduced lunch time information sessions designed to provide information to candidates regarding the organization of the new streams model and what life is like across the training sites. It is the streams-based model, however, combined with additional factors, which members of the discipline believe has contributed to the increase in interested candidates this year.

“Over the period of three days during our CaRMS week this year, we interviewed approximately 200 candidates,” said Steve Lawlor, manager, operations, Discipline of Family Medicine. “This increase of 54 per cent over last year tells us that candidates are interested in what our discipline has to offer.”

And interested those candidates were: it was announced March 4 that the Discipline of Family Medicine achieved a 100 per cent placement rate in the first iteration − the first time this has occurred since the 2010-11 academic year.

“We believe the changes we’ve made to our CaRMS sessions have given candidates a better understanding of the training opportunities unique to the various streams here in Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Dr. O’Keefe. “We’re proud of our program and excited to welcome our new residents.”