Establishing the first family medicine program in Ecuador.

The first family medicine residency program in Ecuador was founded in 1987 by a private evangelical mission hospital under the auspices of the Catholic University of Cuenca. Currently, general medicine is an empiric and poorly respected profession, and medical care is fragmented among multiple specialties and competing systems. This paper reviews the basic principles that guided the development of the program and some of the major challenges and difficulties it has faced. The most important principle of this program is the development of family physician role models who work among other health care professionals and contextualize the basic principles of family medicine to fit Ecuadorian society and its medical needs.