STFM Launches Youth Mentoring Campaign

The new year marks the launch of a new campaign to recruit young people into family medicine. The campaign, "Future Family Docs," is spearheaded by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, or STFM.

The organization will focus its mentoring efforts on premedical school recruitment, particularly among students from underrepresented minorities and rural communities, according to Caryl Heaton, D.O., STFM president, in January's Family Medicine.

Heaton urged all family physicians to "recruit our replacement, plus one," in her article, "Making it Personal: Mentoring Future Family Docs." (PDF file: 2 pages / 94.1 KB. More about PDFs.) "It is time for a 'call to action' for family physicians and family medicine educators," said Heaton. "We must make the job of mentoring students for careers in family medicine personal and real. Let's begin a vigorous effort, a campaign to share who we are and what we do with students, of every age."

STFM's goal is to increase the number of middle school and high school students who consider -- and begin planning for -- a career in family medicine, according to Terrence Steyer, M.D., assistant professor of family medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, who helped plan and develop futurefamilydocs.org, a new Web site that

Among other recruitment campaign tools is "Explore Family Medicine … A Roadmap for your Future" (PDF file: 20 pages / 1.9 MB. More about PDFs.), a workbook published by the AAFP for use in high school classrooms.

"We've had materials for recruiting premedical students in the past, and now we want to target high school students to let them know about careers in primary care, particularly family medicine," said Amy McGaha, M.D., assistant director of medical education at the AAFP.

Revised with permission from material published by the Northwest Missouri Area Health Education Center, "Explore Family Medicine" covers reasons for considering family medicine as a career, college classes to take to prepare for medical school, how to apply to medical schools and what to expect from medical school.