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Helping the Unhoused: Addressing Inadequacies in Ontario’s Medical School Curricula

Endorsed in:

May 2024

Paper Type:

Position Paper

Authors:

  • Poojitha Pai
  • Emily Sodhi
  • Veronica Grad

Background:

We put forward the following principles to guide our below recommendations for implementing
standardized training on the health of Canada’s unhoused population into medical education:

  1. Duty to Medical Students: Ensure undergraduate medical education incorporates high quality, current evidence-based practices that reflect the principles of social justice and patient safety irrespective of medical school attended, student gender identity, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or religious beliefs.
  2. Duty to Patients: All seven of the prerequisites for health, as outlined in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion should be accessible to all patients. In order for the accessibility and
    universality of healthcare in Ontario to improve, standardized training to deconstruct and reshape patient-centered approaches to marginalized individuals must be accessible to Ontarian medical students.
  3. Duty to Health System: Given the prevalence of homelessness, the internal barriers and biases amongst physicians that can lead to discriminatory care of marginalized populations, and the complex web of intersectionalities that can further contribute to poor health, there is an urgent need for future practitioners to have opportunities to reflect on current biases and preconceptions, learn how to dismantle biases, and build a toolkit to recognize future biases.

Recommendations:

  1. Evaluate the current state of homelessness curricula from Ontario’s medical schools to
    identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for curriculum standardization.
  2. With representatives from the OMSA VP External, VP EDI, and VP Education committees to act as provincial liaisons, implement province-wide curriculum changes geared toward
    addressing curriculum shortcomings in the context of homelessness.
  3. Create a standardized deliverable (such as a workshop) supported and promoted by the
    OMSA in 2024/2025 that addresses the unique healthcare needs of Ontario’s unhoused
    population, dismantles medical student biases related to this group, and helps students
    create a toolkit to develop a patient-centered approach to care that focuses on harm
    reduction.

 

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