MISSION
Advancing Family Medicine to Improve Health Through a Community of Teachers and Scholars
VISION
To Become the Indispensable Academic Home for Every Family Medicine Educator
BRAND MESSAGE
Teach & Transform
Download the .pdf of the 2025–2029 Strategic Plan
Five-Year Goals, Objectives, and Tactics
Strategic Goal: STFM will be the leader in training, leadership development, and creation of knowledge that improves family medicine education and teaching.
Objectives and Tactics:
- Provide family medicine faculty with the skills needed to train students, residents, and health care teams to achieve better health, quality care, value, and improved work life of clinicians and staff.
- Provide residency programs and faculty with resources and training to implement competency-based medical education and assessment.
- Help programs meet ACGME clinic continuity requirements.
- Strengthen competencies for behavioral medicine practice and skills for advocating for integrated behavioral health and interprofessional, team-based care.
- Develop curriculum for teaching and assessing professionalism that is challenged by changes in technology, market forces, and health care delivery systems.
- Create and/or disseminate resources for faculty, resident, and medical student education on planetary health’s impact on individual and community health.
- Educate family medicine education teams and learners on advances in health care and health care technology.
- Lead the adoption, implementation, scholarship, and evaluation of ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) in family medicine education.
- Lead adoption and implementation of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in family medicine education.
- Develop leaders.
- Promote opportunities for leadership development and identify opportunities to elevate family medicine educators to leadership roles.
- Identify or develop resources and training to improve financial acumen of faculty and learners.
Strategic Goal: STFM will inspire individuals to become exemplary, fulfilled, and compassionate family medicine teachers.
Objectives and Tactics:
- Increase the number of family medicine faculty to address workforce and pipeline needs within the specialty.
- Advocate for curricula and models of medical education that have the potential to increase the number of family physicians and family medicine educators.
- Promote family medicine as a pathway for learners to make a difference on issues important to them.
- Increase engagement with osteopathic colleagues.
- Reduce financial barriers to careers in academic family medicine.
- Identify and promote loan repayment opportunities for residents and early career faculty.
- Promote well-being at the personal and system level to increase recruitment and retention of family medicine educators and learners.
- Provide intraorganizational advocacy tools to enhance institutional support of faculty educational time.
- Highlight the benefits of interprofessional practice and education on well-being.
- Identify and promote how the use of AI can improve efficiency and reduce burdensome tasks.
Strategic Goal: STFM will enhance the capacity and quality of family medicine scholarship.
Objectives and Tactics:
- Promote adoption of best practices of educational scholarship through the development of a Family Medicine Scholarship Academy.
- Develop a mentorship training program to promote better mentor and mentee practices.
- Offer consultation/mentorship on scholarship, including help with data analysis and identifying funding sources.
- Create a toolkit with educational resources on research methodology and examples of scholarly work.
- Identify or create programming to educate members on evidence-based educational scholarship practices, including statistics, survey design, methodology, institutional review board (IRB) processes, data collection, and scientific writing.
- Advance research in family medicine education.
- Educate peer reviewers on how to do quality peer review.
- Educate members on the critical and reflective use of AI in scholarship.
Strategic Goal: STFM will drive health equity and antiracism initiatives to promote the health of communities through medical education.
Objectives and Tactics:
- Increase the skill set of family medicine faculty and learners related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
- Collaborate with other organizations to identify and act on the needs of rural training sites.
- Create tools and a review process to help authors of STFM resources incorporate antiracism, health equity, and social justice themes into their materials and to eliminate biased content.
- Educate members on how to recognize and prevent ableism and how to teach learners with different abilities.
- Support STFM members in their efforts to transform their institutions to be more inclusive.
- Develop and disseminate resources and practices that take into consideration the impact of local, state, and/or national restrictions on medical education and health outcomes.
- Develop and implement an initiative to build on the successes and learnings of the Antiracism Learning Collaborative.
Strategic Goal: STFM will champion family medicine education, research, and workforce recruitment and retention.
Objectives and Tactics:
- Equip family medicine educators and learners with skills to advocate for issues important to the discipline, their communities, their practices, their patients, and themselves.
- Train faculty and learners to be leaders in family medicine advocacy.
- Work with AAFP and state chapters to conduct advocacy training.
- Advocate for family medicine.
- Partner with other organizations to increase the primary care investment.
- Identify and advocate for sources of funding for family medicine education research, both on a local and national level.
- Lead and support the Academic Family Medicine Advocacy Committee and its legislative priorities.
Assumptions
The plan includes a number of assumptions pertaining to infrastructure and understanding of the organization. Several key areas of importance to STFM are woven into the plan. As a result, there is not a separate goal or objective for these areas, but they will be incorporated as part of every applicable activity. These assumptions include:
- Diversity: STFM commits to the active inclusion of the advancement of diversity in the broadest sense, including geography, race, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, role, profession, ability, etc.
- Underrepresented in Medicine Definition: STFM is using the Association of American Medical College’s definition of URM, which is: "Underrepresented in medicine means those racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in the medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population."
- Strong Infrastructure: Governance, staff, office facilities, technology, and finances are integral parts of the plan and critical to its implementation.
- Innovation: All objectives will include innovative concepts and efforts.
- Communications: Communications are a means to accomplish every goal and do not need to be singled out as a goal. Informing members, communicating with outside groups, marketing products and services, and continuing ongoing publications will be inherent in all appropriate goals.
- Collaborations: Strategic and effective collaborations within the family medicine organizations and with entities outside the family are essential to achieving these goals.
- Technology: Technology broadly falls under infrastructure, eg, having sufficient IT staff and expertise to efficiently and effectively run our organization and programs. STFM also needs to enhance the culture within family medicine where members and learners effectively use technology in new ways.
- STFM Foundation: STFM will support the STFM Foundation and its programs.
- Examination of Member Benefits: This is an ongoing activity that that will be conducted by staff and committees.
