An international course for faculty development in Family Medicine: the Slovenian model Igor S Ï vab, Yonah Yaphe, Jaime Correia de Sousa & Gianluigi Passerini Keywords *Curriculum; education, medical, continu- ing, *methods; family practice, *education; models, educational; Slovenia; teaching, methods. Medical Education 1999;33:780±781 Introduction An international course in Family Medicine has been held annually in Slovenia for the past 7 years. This paper describes the philosophy, content and methods of the course and discusses its impact. The course is centred around the preparation of a teaching module exploring the central themes of Family Medicine. Course methods include individual assignments prior to the course, keynote lectures to introduce the course topic, small group sessions to prepare a teaching module and ®eldwork to test the module in practice. The output of the course has found application in undergraduate courses, vocational training and continuing medical education in several countries. This course design is recommended for faculty development in other settings. Setting/context New departments in family medicine are faced with important challenges: to develop new curricula, 1 course materials and their own teaching skills. 2 Many teachers are not prepared for their new roles. 3 Teaching the principles of Family Medicine is a particularly dif®cult problem. Family Medicine exists everywhere and teachers, often experienced general practitioners, know the realities of everyday practice. Unfortunately, they often lack the broader view of the discipline. Interna- tional co-operation in this area is helpful, but foreign experts often see the situation from their own per- spective. Ideally, the teachers should educate them- selves according to their needs. Development in Slovenia provides an example of such an attempt. With the reform of medical education, Family Medicine was introduced at undergraduate level. There was a need to establish a department and to develop a curriculum. 4 An international workshop was designed with the help of experienced European teachers, using the principles of experiential learning. It lasted 2 days but expanded gradually to 5 days. Seven years' experience with the course is presented here. Learning methods Topics are chosen for their relevance to practice and to the curriculum, based on requests from the course participants on feedback forms. Past topics have in- cluded practice management, record-keeping, quality assurance, communication skills, prevention, principles of family approach and drug prescribing. The core group has been the same since 1991 (IS Ï , JC, GP), while an additional director is selected ac- cording to expertise in the subject. Group facilitators are sometimes also engaged in order to help the par- ticipants with a dif®cult topic. Materials are selected to aid in the preparation of the teaching module, which is the ®nal product of the work. Materials have included existing teaching modules and collections of articles used by the directors in their teaching programmes. Articles are discussed during the course or saved for future reference. In recent years, the Internet has been used as a source of material and method of distribution. After application, the partici- pants are given the basic information material which also includes an assignment to be performed in ad- vance. This encourages the participants to read the material to familiarize themselves with the topic and Medical Faculty, University Department of Family Medicine, Poljanski nasip 58, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Correspondence: Igor S Ï vab MD, PhD Short reports 780 Ó Blackwell Science Ltd MEDICAL EDUCATION 1999;33:780±781