The Cape Breton Family Medicine Teaching Unit is a community-based Family Medicine Residency Training Program associated with Dalhousie University. This program was established in 1997 as a joint agreement between the government of Nova Scotia, Dalhousie University and the Cape Breton District Health Authority. The program is designed to prepare residents to become family physicians who are confident and competent to practice in rural and urban settings where specialty services are reasonably accessible.

Our community-based program uses a preceptor model for our family medicine rotations and most specialty rotations.

Residents who train at the Cape Breton Site will do most of their training in the communities that make up the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). These communities have a combined population of over 104,000.

Together they form the second largest municipality in Nova Scotia. Residents will do most of their training at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. This large, modern facility opened in 1995 serves both as the community hospital for Sydney and surrounding area, and as the major referral centre for Cape Breton Island. This facility is the second largest in the province after Queen Elizabeth II Health Science Centre in Halifax, it is also the second busiest in terms of acute admissions with over 11,000 per year, and ER visits with over 48,000 per year. Again second only to the QE II in Halifax, it has the highest patient care mix (degree of patient complexity) in the province.