Clinician Scholars Program

Goals and Objectives

The Clinical Scholars Program (CSP) is a two-year program that provides training, support, and mentorship to trainees in the General Internal Medicine (GIM) training program to acquire knowledge, skills and experience in health care research. The overall aim of the Clinical Scholar Program (CSP) is to support and promote resident learning in scholarly enquiry. CSP provides access to and mentorship for, a variety of research and scholarly opportunities, including research as it pertains to patient quality improvement. The CSP component is longitudinal over two years, and the CanMEDs roles most emphasized are those of the medical expert, scholar, communicator and patient advocacy. The CSP curriculum provides knowledge and skills in general scholarly methodology and includes devoted sessions to addressing a scholarly question formulation, choosing a study design, developing and writing a proposal, presenting results/findings, and preparing a written report including an abstract. A mandatory scholarly project must be completed at the end of the two years under the guidance of a supervisor. Residents are expected to present their completed projects at the end the two years at the annual Inter-University GIM Residency Research Day. Examples of scholarly projects include a case report, a chart or practice audit, a literature review, a quality improvement project, a chart review, or an observational/clinical research project. Residents are expected to meet a minimum of three (3) times with their supervisor in PGY4 and five (5) times in PGY 5. STACERs permit documentation of regular assessment and feedback on the progress of the CSP project. These sessions along with guidance and mentorship from the CSP directors and project supervisors provide the residents with the tools necessary to complete their scholarly activity. 

The timeline for completion of the project is as follows: