2025-26 Medical Education Annual Report

Welcome to the 2025-2026 annual report for the Office of the Vice Dean, Medical Education. This series of reports highlights selected innovations and achievements in and across the MD Program, Postgraduate Medical Education (PGME), Continuing Professional Development (CPD), and Integrated Physician Scientist Training Program (IPSTP). It also includes messages from the Director of the Physician Assistant Program, which joined the medical education portfolio in October 2025, and the Associate Dean, Learner Affairs.

We launched the inaugural Medical Education Strategic Plan in June 2023. Organized according to three overarching strategic priorities, our strategic plan identifies nine strategic initiatives focused on opportunities for alignment, integration or harmonization as well as corresponding strategic actions. Thanks to the ongoing, collaborative efforts of education leaders and administrative staff across the medical education portfolio, we have made significant progress towards achievement of the initiatives and actions identified in our plan, as outlined on our Medical Education Strategic Plan Progress webpage.

The initiatives and actions identified in our strategic plan do not represent the full scope of the portfolio, including the many day-to-day activities that that are directly and indirectly essential to our shared education mission. Rather, our plan was designed to identify and provide direction for specific priorities.

One such priority is the consolidation of existing legacy systems (MedSIS and POWER) and various fragmented IT systems across MD and PGME into a fully integrated system that will enable core and ancillary functions of medical education while optimizing the user experience, training outcomes, operational efficiency and facilitating the collection of data to inform ongoing quality assurance and reporting. Known as the Medical Education Information Technology Transformation (MEITT) Project, this transformational change will be one of the largest, most complex initiatives in our faculty’s history involving MD, PGME and the clinical departments, working in close collaboration with MedIT.

Another priority for the medical education portfolio is the expansion and effective distribution of our education programs, including to the Scarborough campus as part of the Scarborough Academy of Medicine and Integrated Health (SAMIH). While medical education is essential to SAMIH, SAMIH is not just medical education. However, the establishment of SAMIH includes three components that are of particular importance to the medical education portfolio. First, the Scarborough Academy of Medicine (SAM) has been established as the MD Program’s fifth academy. Second, we are expanding postgraduate medical education across the GTA, with a primary focus on Scarborough and Mississauga. Third, SAMIH will be the physical home of the Physician Assistant Program, with that move on schedule for the 2026-2027 academic year.

We are committed to working as collaborative leaders and partners with other decanal portfolios, departments, offices, and our hospital affiliates to promote, advance and support this expansion of our education programs. This commitment includes providing faculty development, both specific to SAMIH and, more generally, to continue to enable and support innovative approaches to teaching and learning at all three University of Toronto campuses and within our hospital partners.

I would like to thank all members of the medical education community for showing me what is possible, and demonstrating over and over again that by working together we can achieve the kind of success that makes Temerty Medicine a recognized local and global leader in health professional education.

Patricia Houston
Vice Dean Medical Education
Temerty Faculty of Medicine