Family Adoption Program in Undergraduate Medical Education: Scoping Review to Assess Research Void

The Family Adoption Program (FAP), instituted by the National Medical Commission (NMC) as an integral component of India's Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) curriculum, requires every undergraduate medical student to adopt and longitudinally monitor at least five families—typically from rural or urban slum communities—spanning all four professional years. This initiative shifts focus from lecturing learning to experiential community engagement, encompassing sociodemographic profiling, environmental risk assessments, non-communicable disease screenings, and health education sessions, thereby bridging theoretical knowledge with practical application in addressing India's healthcare inequities. With over 65% of India's population residing in rural areas and Tamil Nadu, with nearly 48-50% of its population residing in rural areas, continue to face significant rural–urban disparities in healthcare access, having reports of inadequate healthcare infrastructure, high disease burdens, and social determinants of health, FAP equips future physicians with essential competencies in empathy, communication, cultural sensitivity, and preventive care—skills often underdeveloped in traditional hospital-based training. Thus, FAP would serve mainly two purposes, which are to facilitate linkage, awareness, screening, referral, and navigation to healthcare facilities among residents of rural areas, and secondly, to provide medical students with community focused training. In view of the expanding implementation of the Family Adoption Program under the CBME framework, and the contextual variations in its execution across institutions, a focused synthesis of existing evidence is essential. A scoping review on FAP will help map the extent, nature, and outcomes of the program, identify implementation challenges and gaps in the literature, and inform future curricular refinement, policy decisions, and faculty development to strengthen community-oriented medical education. This review aims to map the existing literature on family adoption programs, systematically identifying key research gaps to guide future investigations in this critical area.