Sherbrooke - Montevideo: a socially responsible international collaboration to foster family medicine.

BACKGROUND: The World Health Organization advocates for faculties of medicine to orient health professional education toward the needs of the populations graduates are to serve and to include a greater emphasis on primary health care. It was in this framework that in 2007, the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke (FMHS-UdeS) in Canada and the Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de la Republica (FMUdelaR) in Montevideo, Uruguay developed a comprehensive collaboration to sustain the development of family medicine in both universities through education, practice and research. ACTIVITIES AND OUTCOMES: In addition to information sharing through email and teleconferencing, this five year collaboration has included 28 bilateral visits by the two institutions' teachers and leaders. During these visits, Uruguayan members participated in workshops and benefited from exchanges during educational and clinical activities. Interactions led to the improvement of their skills as teachers of family medicine with an emphasis on clinical teaching, supervision, feedback to learners in clinical evaluations, use of various educational methods, use of standardized patients for teaching and evaluation, and research. FMHS-UdeS members learned about the community aspects of family medicine in Uruguay and reflected on how these could be implemented to the benefit of Canadians. CONCLUSIONS: The international collaboration forged between the FMHS-UdeS and the FMUdelaR represents a socially responsible endeavor that has been highly rewarding for all involved. It represents a significant learning opportunity for each group aiming to better prepare physicians to serve as primary health care providers in their communities.

[Virtual room of gastroenterology]. / Aula virtual de gastroenterologia.

The amount of published information and its continuing growth can no longer be managed by an individual searcher. One of today's great challenges for the academic researcher and clinician is to find a relevant scientific article using bibliographic search strategies. We aimed to design and build a Virtual Room of Gastroenterology (VRG) generating real-time automated search strategies and producing bibliographic and full text search results. These results update and complement with the latest evidence the Clinical Guideline Program of the World Gastroenterology Organisation. The HTML driven interface provides a series of pre-formulated MeSH based search strategies for each Aula. For each topic between 10 and 20 specific terms, qualifiers and subheadings are identified. The functionality of the VRG is based on the PubMed's characteristic that allows a search strategy to be captured as a web address. The VRG is available in Spanish and English, and the access is free. There are 28 rooms currently available. All together these rooms provide an advanced bibliographic access using more than 900 pre-programmed MeSH driven strategies. In a further very recent development some of the topics of VRG now allow cascade based searches. These searches look at resource sensitive options and possible ethnic difference per topic. The VRG allows significant reductions in time required to design and carry out complex bibliographic searches in the areas of gastroenterology, hepatology and endoscopy. The system updates automatically in real-time thus ensuring the currency of the results.