Social Medicine, New Medicine? A curricular integration driving deeper learning with the social drivers of patient care.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. In response to a curricular vision of improved social accountability, our Doctor of Medicine program launched a year-long integrated Social Medicine course designed and implemented for Year 1 medical school students. Our school is a moderate sized medical school serving a region of close to 2 M people in central Canada. The Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry Doctor of Medicine Program at Western University, London, Ontario Canada, is grounded in a four-year curriculum, each year comprised of up to 171 students with a clinical clerkship in Year 3. Our curriculum is delivered in a distributed fashion between two campuses approximately 200 km apart: London (133) and Windsor (38) learners.The vision of our leadership and learner partners was to provide students with an opportunity to concentrate early in their career on the impact of social, cultural and economic forces on medicine and patient care. Under the umbrella of this new Social Medicine course, we incorporated previous courses in population health, epidemiology, ethics and service learning to provide an exposure to cultural and societal roots; social inequalities; factors impacting treatment outcomes; ethical challenges and experiential community learning opportunities. This article, based upon our Short Communication, "Social Medicine, New Medicine? Redefining Social Medicine for Year 1 medical students", presented at AMEE in Barcelona, 2016, will discuss the origins of our course design as well as the rationale, objectives and caveats of this particular course.