Laying the foundation: teaching policy and advocacy to medical trainees

A novel and comprehensive two-year health policy curriculum was developed and implemented for family medicine residents at two University of Toronto-affiliated teaching sites.

To evaluate the impact of the curriculum on residents' knowledge of health policy issues, and its usefulness to their learning.

The evaluation included a pre-post delivery assessment of residents' content-based knowledge of issues in the Canadian healthcare system. Residents were also asked to evaluate the content, process and usefulness of the health policy curriculum.

At the end, more than two-thirds of residents had a better understanding of the Canadian healthcare system. The overall pre-post scores showed that residents retained content-based facts in some detail. However, more importantly, residents' positive evaluations of the curriculum indicated they were engaged, enthusiastic and recognized its importance for their learning.

Despite residents' positive evaluations, questions remain as to how best to assess the success of health policy curricula. Moving beyond the popular pre-post test, less traditional approaches might complement standard program evaluation methods in future. As educators increasingly develop curricula aimed at non-biomedical expertise, we must consider how we can most meaningfully evaluate long-term impact on graduates' approach to clinical practice and their engagement in health system advocacy.