TECHNICAL ADVANCE Open Access Developing a curriculum framework for global health in family medicine: emerging principles, competencies, and educational approaches Lynda Redwood-Campbell 1* , Barry Pakes 2 , Katherine Rouleau 3 , Colla J MacDonald 4 , Neil Arya 5 , Eva Purkey 6 , Karen Schultz 6 , Reena Dhatt 7 , Briana Wilson 8 , Abdullahel Hadi 9 and Kevin Pottie 10 Abstract Background: Recognizing the growing demand from medical students and residents for more comprehensive global health training, and the paucity of explicit curricula on such issues, global health and curriculum experts from the six Ontario Family Medicine Residency Programs worked together to design a framework for global health curricula in family medicine training programs. Methods: A working group comprised of global health educators from Ontario’s six medical schools conducted a scoping review of global health curricula, competencies, and pedagogical approaches. The working group then hosted a full day meeting, inviting experts in education, clinical care, family medicine and public health, and developed a consensus process and draft framework to design global health curricula. Through a series of weekly teleconferences over the next six months, the framework was revised and used to guide the identification of enabling global health competencies (behaviours, skills and attitudes) for Canadian Family Medicine training. Results: The main outcome was an evidence-informed interactive framework http://globalhealth. ennovativesolution.com/ to provide a shared foundation to guide the design, delivery and evaluation of global health education programs for Ontario’s family medicine residency programs. The curriculum framework blended a definition and mission for global health training, core values and principles, global health competencies aligning with the Canadian Medical Education Directives for Specialists (CanMEDS) competencies, and key learning approaches. The framework guided the development of subsequent enabling competencies. Conclusions: The shared curriculum framework can support the design, delivery and evaluation of global health curriculum in Canada and around the world, lay the foundation for research and development, provide consistency across programmes, and support the creation of learning and evaluation tools to align with the framework. The process used to develop this framework can be applied to other aspects of residency curriculum development. Background Medical trainees in high-income countries have a grow- ing interest to practice medicine with vulnerable and marginalized populations in both domestic and interna- tional settings [1]. Ethical and sustained practice throughout the global village demands an understanding of the complex forces that influence the health of indivi- duals and populations [2]. It also requires practical skills that enable effective practice in resource-limited settings including articulating roles as advocates and profes- sionals both locally and globally [3]. The Paris Declara- tion on Aid Effectiveness (2005) emphasizes the need for working together and focusing on results [4]. While core content competencies are emerging [5], there is a need for standardized global health curriculum [6] and strategies to address these dynamic trainee needs [7]. Global health emphasizes the central importance of health equity and the need for interdisciplinary colla- borative actions to address health inequities [8]. Learn- ing to address issues that transcend national boundaries * Correspondence: redwood@mcmaster.ca 1 Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University, 175 Longwood Road South, Hamilton, L8S 1A4 Canada (lead Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Redwood-Campbell et al. BMC Medical Education 2011, 11:46 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/46 © 2011 Redwood-Campbell et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.