George Frost Kennan and the Policy of Containment

Recent news accounts routinely describe the tenor of dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union as increasingly hard-line and uncompromising. The Cold War atmosphere, it seems, has never been more frigid. Some impassioned observers contend that mankind is teetering ever more closely to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. Yet the definitive answer to the gnawing question as to how the world arrived at such a dangerous precipice remains elusive. Analysts in general, and historians in particular, have advanced numerous explanations for the rapid deterioration of the World War II Grand Alliance, but they have failed to arrive at a consensus. Their efforts, nevertheless, have led to a fuller understanding of this most important topic. Most scholars now agree on the need to focus on the immediate postwar period and the evolution of the policy of containment. Accordingly, the acknowledged " father" of that policy, George Frost Kennan, has become a subject of intense concern and controversy

Developing a Curriculum Framework for Global Health in Family Medicine: Emerging Principles, Competencies, and Educational Approaches

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\u27s 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\u27s 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