Medicine's Push for Resource Stewardship in Education and Practice

Resource stewardship is central to high-quality clinical practice. It is motivated by ethical and evidence-based principles, and has the potential to improve the quality of patient care while maximizing the utility of limited healthcare system resources. Despite this, resource stewardship has not been regularly included in medical education, and both practicing physicians and new medical trainees have a need and desire for increased training in this topic. It is especially important to teach medical trainees how to make high-value clinical decisions from the beginning of their medical education. New initiatives in the United States have set examples for why and how this multifaceted subject can be included in medical curricula. While the importance of appropriate care is outlined in the CanMEDS framework, Canada is less advanced in its resource stewardship curriculum development. Learning from the successes of the United States and a few Canadian examples, Canada can integrate value-based decision-making into its core medical curricula, maximize its quality of care, and ultimately function as an exemplar of resource stewardship internationally.