Elective duration

• Electives are a minimum of 35 hours a week.
• University of Ottawa electives are a minimum of 1 week and a maximum of 2 weeks.
• Electives elsewhere in Canada are a minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 4 weeks, and must not exceed a total of 12 weeks.
• Exception: The Eastern Regional Medical Education Program (ERMEP) placements are 4 weeks minimum.

Elective types

Electives can be clinical or non-clinical. A maximum of 4 weeks of non-clinical placements are allowed in 4^th year.

Supervision

Your supervisor must be a practising physician, not a resident.

Refer to the Conflict of Interest in Clinical Placements Policy for more details.

If your assigned placement is in violation of this policy, you must immediately notify the Medical Education Office or elective coordinators to request a reassignment.

Geographical restrictions

You may undertake electives at any Canadian, North American LCME/CACMS accredited medical school, distributed medical education provincial network, or approved community setting. You may also complete an international elective. However, you must be in Canada or continental USA on CaRMS match day. International electives abroad are not permitted during that period. We must be able to contact you easily if you urgently need to return to Ottawa after a failed CaRMS match. In such cases, we have less than 24 hours to prepare a new application and support you in the process.

The only electives that will count toward the 18 weeks requirement are those that have been approved, entered in your clinical placement account and for which evaluations confirming successful completion have been received.

You must submit an approval request for all your electives through your clinical placement account at least 1 month prior the start of any elective. If you do not have a pre-approved elective in your account 2 weeks prior to an elective start date, it will be brought to the attention of the clerkship director.

Any modification must be done through your clinical placement account by entering a new approval request and deleting the entry that is no longer valid.

Important: An elective cannot take place if it has not been pre-approved by the specialist, Academic Administration, Year 4. Without this approval, your placement will not be credited and a professionalism complaint may be filed against you. In addition, your record will be brought to the attention of the clerkship director.

Requesting approval for your electives

1. Plan your elective.
2. Access the Student Tools application with your One45 identifiers.
3. Open your file and choose "Clinical Placement".
4. Choose "Request approval for an elective" and complete all sections of the form, then click "Submit".

Note: Don’t forget to select your preceptor from the drop-down list. If no one has been assigned to you yet, enter the name of the coordinator who confirmed the elective or choose "Elective confirmed by Department Coordinator". You will be able to modify this information at the end of your elective. If the preceptor’s name does not appear in the drop-down menu, select "Preceptor does not appear in list" and write their first and last name, and email address in the comment box.

Once the Medical Education Office has approved your elective (within 48-72 hours), your file will automatically be updated.

In accordance with the AFMC National Student Elective Diversification Policy, all clinical electives have been categorized according to the CaRMS list of "Entry-level disciplines". An entry-level discipline is an entry route in the PGY-1 (R1) match.

You must cover a minimum of 3 PGY-1 entry level and PGY-3-4 subspecialties, by doing at least 2 weeks in each discipline. A maximum of 8 weeks of clinical electives is allowed in the same discipline.

IMPORTANT: The 8-week maximum applies to all students, whether you apply for residency through CaRMS, the ERAS or both — and even if you choose not to apply for residency at all.

Note: The diversification policy does not apply to selectives.

Tagging your electives

You must tag a discipline to your electives when entering them in your clinical placement account:

*Non-clinical electives do not count toward a discipline. However, for tracking purposes they should be tagged as "D31 Non-clinical".

Special circumstances

The discipline is based on the preceptor’s main specialty. However, there may be exceptions:

• A placement with a family physician doing only emergency medicine would be tagged as "Emergency Medicine".
• A placement with a family physician practising both at the emergency department and in clinic would be tagged as "Family medicine".