March 26, 2019—The STFM Project Fund encourages STFM Collaboratives and Special Project Teams to plan, develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate findings from educationally-related scholarly projects.  This year, the STFM Foundation has chosen to provide $15,000 in grants to the following projects:

Project: STFM/CFPC Global Family Medicine Education Symposium

Many of the challenges faced in expanding and advocating for family medicine education are not unique to the United States context. Research and practice improvement findings are available from around the globe which can better inform our own educational systems and structures and, similarly, allow us to share our own best practices with others. STFM-GHEC leadership, in conjunction with colleagues in the Canadian Family Physicians, including representatives of the University of Toronto and the Besrour Center, will host an evening dinner symposium on Monday, April 29th, during the STFM Annual Spring Conference. The event will offer an opportunity for both formal and informal networking and knowledge sharing between US and internationally-based physicians surrounding topics of key importance in family medicine education.

STFM Collaborative: Global Health Educators
Principal Investigator: Esther Johnston, MD, MPH, The Wright Center National Family Medicine Residency at HealthPoint, Auburn, WA
Award: $1,000 over 1 year

Project: Beginning Writing Skills for Early Career Minority Faculty

This project will be a two-year extension of the writing workshops from STFM. The steering committee of the multicultural and minority health collaborative will take on six new, junior faculty members and actively mentor them from writing a letter to the editor to completing their first manuscript based on their published letter to the editor. We will assist them in finding data sources, completing the IRB application, analyzing the data, and writing the manuscript. We will also encourage the protégés to present at two conferences and use those presentations to inform the scholarly project.

STFM Collaborative: Minority and Multicultural Health
Principal Investigator: Jose Rodriguez, MD, University of Utah Health Sciences
Award: $8,000 over 2 years

Project: Creation of a National Addiction Medicine Curriculum for Family Medicine Residency Programs

The STFM’s Addiction Collaborative proposes the creation of a national addiction medicine curriculum accessible to Family Medicine Residency programs across the country seeking to launch a first-time curriculum or improve an existing one. We will design this curriculum via a 3-step approach: first, we will develop a list of core competencies by soliciting feedback from expert family medicine educators across the country and from national addiction societies’ guidelines; second, we will develop a curriculum based on these competencies; third, we will test and evaluate this curriculum at several residency programs across the country before more broadly expanding access. The curriculum will cater to programs with various levels of need and include both online and in-person learning. We will create high quality, interactive modules with videos, case scenarios, knowledge checks, and learning objectives that residents can complete asynchronously. Taking a flipped classroom approach, we will also design an instructor’s guide that faculty can use to facilitate an in-person classroom session with discussions and practice through case-based learning. Finally, we will offer family medicine residency program faculty members opportunities for enhanced teaching support through a six-month ECHO (Extension for Community Health Outcomes) hub that provides bi-weekly didactics, case presentations, and expert troubleshooting with members of the Addiction Collaborative. This multimodal curriculum will thus provide a complete package of knowledge-based content and skill development that is adaptable to the needs and capacity of any residency program. We will specifically cater to faculty who have little specialized training in addiction but still create content that can be tweaked by those with more robust training. We will also design strategies for programs to support and evaluate resident competency development over time. We will pilot the national addiction medicine curriculum at several residency programs and evaluate its effectiveness and feasibility. We will then seek additional funding from national and state organizations (e.g., AAFP, ASAM) to expand and improve the curriculum and disseminate it across the country.

STFM Collaborative: Addiction
Principal Investigator: Randi Sokol, MD, MPH, MMedEd, Tufts Family Medicine Residency, Malden, MA
Award: $6,000 over 2 years

The STFM Project Fund is supported by donations to the STFM Foundation.