Medical Education Ripe for Change: SFU Medicine seizes opportunity to positively impact primary care in B.C. – School of Medicine

Simon Fraser University’s new School of Medicine aims to improve equity, access and primary care in B.C.’s healthcare system, while leveraging its best and brightest researchers, professors, mentors and innovators.

In pursuit of a more collaborative, community-oriented pathway through medical education and into the workforce, planning for the School began in 2021.

Central pillars of its mission include a focus on training primary care physicians in, with  and for communities; increasing equity and access; advancing team-based care, and transforming the current healthcare system structure by training future physicians as  catalysts for change.

“There are lots of great innovators, researchers and people who want to do things better at SFU,” said SFU Faculty of Biomedical Physiology researcher Dr. Steve Reynolds. “By having a medical school embedded in the university, it provides that opportunity for closer collaboration with the larger healthcare community.”

Current education systems need to become more responsive to students’ learning styles today, incorporating rapidly-changing technologies, and simultaneously avoiding outdated models that waste time and resources, he asserts.

“This new medical school presents an opportunity to modernize the learning process,” he said. “The next generation needs to be able to navigate these [challenges] and to be able to think of medicine differently – we don’t have to do medicine the way we’ve always done medicine; we have to be creative, we have to find the space to innovate.”

Everything she does touches on issues of primary care access and equity, she said, which is the foundation of our health care system.

“The health care systems that place a broader emphasis on primary care serve their populations better,” she said. “Their populations are healthier, and they have better health equity outcomes. It’s just such a critical part of the health care system.”

Similarly, Dr. Reynolds sees the new medical school as a valuable opportunity, given that its mission is aligned with his core passion of adaptation and innovation in medical education, ultimately redefining the healthcare system to better serve the community.

He acknowledges that practicing medicine is a difficult career path to take while pointing out the unique privilege of it.

“You’re dealing with people that are suffering,” he said. “It’s a challenge, but it is an immense privilege. You have an opportunity to help people in ways that you could never help them otherwise, at a time when they so desperately need help.”

The school’s prospective students and its graduates will be given that opportunity, along with a chance to seize a moment at which medical education is changing, with AI and new technologies.

“I’m excited about SFU’s new medical school because I do think that there is a future in medicine, and a satisfying role and position and potential for prospective students,” said Dr. Reynolds. “[Technology is] going to change the way that we communicate and capture information, and when done right it has the opportunity to bring us back to the core of medicine and healing.”