Rural Medical Education (2011)

The need to better prepare doctors for rural and remote practice continues to be a pressing issue in medical education around the world. Rural and remote communities continue to have unequal health outcomes and lower proportions of medical practitioners, and doctors continue to be poorly prepared for the challenges they face in these communities. Medical educators continue to experience difficulty accessing sound information about how to deliver courses that help meet these workforce challenges. The international medical education community continues to struggle to find forums where they can share international learnings on this subject.This special issue is designed to be used as a resource for undergraduate medical educators wanting to deliver medical education courses that provide a sound emphasis on rural and remote health. It is also designed to be useful to policy-makers and researchers wanting to know ?what works' to deliver undergraduate medical education for rural and remote practice. Collectively, these papers offer a wide range of strategies for meeting education delivery challenges in the key areas of rural and remote workforce preparation:* recruitment and retention of rural origin students, as well as encouraging career choices for rural and remote medicine* undergraduate curriculum for rural and remote medicine* teaching and learning for rural and remote medicine in undergraduate courses, including community-based placementsThe papers have been commissioned by the editors from authors who were asked to offer practical models for delivering best practice rural and remote medical education. Thus the collection focuses on offering case studies from around the world with concrete exemplars of practice, suggestions for further reading and other practical information designed for ?on-the-ground' delivery of undergraduate medical education. However, all contributing authors were also asked to draw on the relevant body of research evidence in their area to also provide considered scholarly discussion of ?what works'. This means that the presentation of working models of rural and remote medical education is, wherever possible, underpinned by supporting evidence from the international literature.The principal audience for this collection of papers will be medical educators around the world needing practical tools for delivering medical education courses. This includes both the developed and developing world which share many similar challenges in rural and remote workforce preparation. Thus, the collection should work as a teaching delivery resource for those working in medical education schools and units. As many urban-based schools and units are keen to better prepare medical practitioners for rural and remote practice challenges, the audience for this collection is likely to include all those involved with medical education delivery around the world. Secondary audiences include researchers in medical education, as well as policy-makers in regional and national government departments of health wanting better information about what kinds of policy frameworks to develop and programs to fund.Three lead agenciesThis project has been led by an editorial team from the University Department of Rural Health (UDRH) and Medical Education, School of Medicine at the University of Tasmania in Australia, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD-IL) in Israel.The multidisciplinary UDRH in Tasmania is committed to improving access to health care resources and contributing to improved health outcomes for people in rural and remote areas of Tasmania by:* Working collaboratively to achieve an adequate, appropriately trained and stable rural health care workforce;* Facilitating access to appropriate education and training opportunities, resources and on-going support across the learning continuum, and* Promoting and supporting a primary health care approach to rural health research and preventative health strategies (http://www. …