Dr. Dominick Shelton, Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Medicine assistant dean of admissions, at the the future site of the med school in Brampton, Ont., on Sept. 26, 2024.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Toronto Metropolitan University’s new medical school will have three targeted admission pathways aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of certain groups in the medical profession.
The TMU School of Medicine received its preliminary accreditation Friday, which clears the way to accept applications from prospective students ahead of the 2025 academic year. The school will be located in Brampton, Ont., about an hour’s drive from the university’s downtown Toronto campus.
It will have specialized admission consideration for Black students, for Indigenous students and for students from what it describes as equity-deserving groups. The third category is broad, and includes those who’ve grown up in poverty or in the child welfare system, who have a disability or chronic health condition, who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ or belong to a racialized group.
Dr. Dominick Shelton, assistant dean of admissions at TMU School of Medicine, said he expects about 75 per cent of incoming students will be admitted on one of those three pathways. His hope is that by better reflecting the makeup of a diverse community they will be better able to serve its health care needs.
“We are going to be focused on addressing the underrepresentation of many groups within medicine,” Dr. Shelton said. “They are going to bring a perspective from their life experiences that will inform the type of physician that they become.”
A published study of Canadian medical student demographics, conducted through an online survey of students at 14 schools in 2018, found that respondents came from families with significantly higher levels of income and education than the population at large.
The med students surveyed were about four times more likely to have a parent with a master’s or doctorate degree, and they were more than twice as likely as the general population to come from a family with income greater than $100,000 a year.
They were significantly less likely to be Black or Indigenous, or to have grown up in a rural area.
It has become relatively common in recent years for medical schools to create specialized pathways for certain underrepresented groups. All Ontario medical schools have programs to encourage the admission of Indigenous students, and the University of Saskatchewan has up to 20 seats for Indigenous applicants. At the University of Toronto, a program promotes the candidacy of students who identify as Black, although it has no specific quota. There are also programs across the country that prioritize applicants from rural areas, francophones and members of the Canadian Forces.
Admission requirements for TMU’s medical school are designed to eliminate relatively few candidates. There are no course prerequisites, applicants can hold any type of four-year undergraduate degree with a minimum grade point average of 3.3, roughly equivalent to a B-plus. The Medical College Admission Test, a standardized exam used by many medical schools, will not be used in the selection process.
Applicants will also be asked to answer a handful of questions that TMU says align with its mission and vision. One is about how an applicant’s lived experience prepared them for a career in medicine, one is about leadership with respect to advocating for marginalized groups and one is about the candidate’s connection to Brampton and Peel Region and their interest in practising in a culturally diverse community.
Brampton is described by TMU as a microcosm of the Canada of the future. More than 53 per cent of its 650,000 residents were born abroad, with nearly 95,000 having immigrated between 2011 and 2021.
Patients in the area, as in many parts of Ontario, struggle to find primary care providers. Around 2.5 million people in Ontario don’t have a family doctor, according to the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
TMU will admit 94 MD students in its first year. It will also be running residency programs for 105 med school graduates beginning in the summer of 2025. Its primary clinical partner is the William Osler Health System and it also has agreements with health providers in Mississauga, Orangeville and Halton.
“There’s going to be very much a focus on equity, even within the curriculum, to be able to better serve the community,” Dr. Shelton said.
The dean of the medical school, Dr. Teresa Chan, said TMU wants to be “a school of changemakers.”
She said TMU’s focus will be on primary care and generalist medicine. In keeping with TMU’s tradition of hands-on learning, she said students will have opportunities to do six-month clerkships in family medicine where they can have a longer exposure to the field than is typically the case.
The TMU school of medicine will be based in the former Bramalea civic centre, which is undergoing renovations to prepare for the arrival of new students next September.