Family medicine education in India: A panoramic view

In the recent years, there has been renewed interest in strengthening primary care for improved health services delivery. Family medicine with its holistic principles is an effective approach for building primary care workforce in resource constraint settings. Even though this discipline is well established and mainstreamed in Western countries, the same is yet to occur in low- and middle-income nations. India with its paradigm shift for universal health coverage is strategically poised to embrace family medicine as a core component of its health system. However, till date, a clear picture of family medicine teaching across the country is yet to be available.

This paper makes an attempt to assess the landscape of family medicine teaching in India with an aim to contribute to a framework for bolstering its teaching and practice in coming years. The objective was to obtain relevant information through a detailed scan of the health professional curricula as well as mapping independent academic programs. Specific areas of interest included course content, structure, eligibility criteria, and accreditation.

Our findings indicate that teaching of family medicine is still in infancy in India and yet to be mainstreamed in health professional education. There are variations in family medicine teaching across academic programs.

It is suggested that both medical and nursing colleges should develop dedicated Departments of Family Medicine for both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. Further, more number of standalone diploma courses adopting blended learning methods should be made available for in-service practitioners.