Waterloo Regional Campus

The Kitchener-Waterloo and Area (KW) site incorporates excellent learning opportunities in Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and Wellesley. Our site has a reputation for being innovative, progressive, and highly supportive. An internal match at this site is designed to assist in matching residents with supervisors that share their same interests.

The Family Medicine program is based at the University of Waterloo Health Sciences Campus in downtown Kitchener, associated with the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy and School of Optometry. Also housed on campus is the Waterloo Regional Campus of the Michael G. Degroote School of Medicine of McMaster University. This collection of professional schools allows for tremendous opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and the sharing of expertise.

The campus also houses the Centre for Family Medicine FHT and has received wide acclaim for many of its innovations. MINT Memory Clinics, founded by Dr. Linda Lee, has an international reputation for transforming primary care for patients and families suffering from dementia. Some of the other national primary care innovations that our residents are involved with include the Mobility Clinic for persons with severe physical challenges, the Anti-coagulation Clinic, e-Health Centre of Excellence, and the Schlegel Research Institute for Aging.

We are the largest teaching site outside of Hamilton, which allows our academic programming to run locally. KW presenters are chosen carefully by residents for their expertise and engagement.

McMaster’s Waterloo Regional Campus is a robust community-based Internal Medicine residency training program.  We combine excellent internal medicine clinical training in a community environment with the academic and research support of our Hamilton campus to effectively prepare residents for practice as a generalist or a subspecialist.  We seek to prepare our residents to effectively deal with the full range of medical patients with chronic multi-system disease to the critically ill. 

The program is organized into 13 block rotations per year, each of 4 weeks’ duration. Clinical rotations occur at the 3 main hospitals in Hamilton (St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton General Hospital, and Juravinski Hospital), as well as the two main teaching hospitals in the Waterloo Wellington Region, Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital. Within the KW area, additional placements may occur at Guelph General Hospital in Guelph and Cambridge Memorial Hospital in Cambridge (both within a thirty-minute drive), but these placements are less frequent.

Clinical exposure is broad. Grand River Hospital hosts several regional programs including the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre, Hepatobiliary Surgical Program, Regional Stroke and Renal disease programs, and a large Mental Health Programs. It is home to a busy General Internal Medicine Rapid Access Clinic, a 30-bed Clinical Teaching Unit and a 22-bed Level III Critical Care Unit. 

St. Mary's General Hospital is a Regional Cardiac Care Centre and a Centre of Excellence for Respiratory and Centre of Thoracic Care. Both sites are equipped with videoconferencing capabilities and both sites are busy with 65,000-75,000 ER visits per year. The two hospitals receive constant referrals from outside hospitals, and trainees are exposed to a huge variety of pathologies from peripheral communities. Finally, these two hospitals are conveniently located fewer than four kilometers apart.

The Pediatric Residency Program accepts 10-13 residents per year from various entry streams- including one from the Waterloo stream. The program is committed to providing exceptional, flexible training in clinical pediatrics, advocacy, scholarly work and education. Residents benefit from our faculty's collegial approach and broad expertise, enabling trainees to thrive as they prepare for a career in pediatric medicine or its subspecialties.

The Waterloo program offers the unique experience of a combined academic tertiary residency program with that of a community-based program. While at McMaster Children's Hospital (MCH), residents obtain exposure to the diagnosis and management of a diverse spectrum of disease through subspecialty and critical care rotations. Residents will develop relationships with academic faculty at MCH, including opportunities for clinical and scholarly mentorship. McMaster University is the home of many of the world experts in evidence-based medicine. Residents in the training program can expect to receive outstanding formal training and critical appraisal skills through CTU rounds, Academic Half Day, Journal Clubs, subspecialty teaching rounds, and our unique ward-teaching schedule. Through their clinical rotations, residents learn to use literature in daily management of patients giving them life long learning skills that will make them better physicians.

Residents selected for the Waterloo program will also spend a portion of their training at Grand River Hospital (GRH), and surrounding teaching sites in the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo. At GRH, residents will have longitudinal exposure to neonatal resuscitation and intensive care, as well as general pediatric issues both in an inpatient and ambulatory setting. Residents receive an excellent foundation in pediatrics that will prepare them for any career they may eventually choose.

Residents in the Waterloo program will have the opportunity for earlier independence and leadership, both in the clinical realm and beyond. Residents play a pivotal role in continuing to improve and vitalize the program. Their opinions are highly valued and we depend on resident involvement to keep the program evolving, and to maintain high morale and pride amongst the residents.

Residents will be a part of a program known for its innovation and leadership in educational scholarship. The Waterloo region is also home to the Waterloo Regional Campus branch of the undergraduate medical program, as well as a strong family medicine residency program. As such, pediatric residents have many opportunities for teaching, including formal clinical skills to the undergraduate class, as well as for clinical clerks and family medicine residents.

In 2010, the innovative and personalized training that defines the McMaster program expanded to include the expertise of our community-based faculty in the Waterloo and Wellington regions. The Waterloo Regional Campus (WRC) program affords residents all of the educational and service highlights of the Hamilton program, with further opportunities to learn through innovative and technologically advanced strategies in community settings.

As psychiatric care becomes more focused within the community, particularly for those with severe and persistent mental illness, the training of psychiatrists within this setting will foster the necessary skills required for community-based psychiatry practice of the future. At McMaster University, we are delighted to offer training within the WRC, which is rich in learning opportunities and dedicated faculty, yet only 65 kilometers away from the city of Hamilton. Training within the Waterloo division of the McMaster provides residents with experiences in a variety of community and rural settings, while maintaining strong connections to the academic environment.

The Waterloo program is fully integrated with the Hamilton site of the McMaster Psychiatry program, with ongoing opportunities for residents and faculty of each site to work and learn together. Such collaboration allows residents a greater pool of expertise and experiences from which to draw in order to tailor their training to their individual interests and needs.

The majority of rotations will be completed in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, with only four months of BCT training being completed in Hamilton.