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Rural Clinical School
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Rural Clinical Schools
Rural Clinical School History
The Australian Government established the Rural Clinical School program in 1999 as a component of its Rural Health Strategy. The program now supports a national network of 14 rural clinical schools, managed by 12 universities. Rural Clinical Schools aim to support the rural communities by encouraging medical students to consider a career in rural clinical practice. Through this initiative, 25 per cent of Australian Government-supported medical students undertake a minimum of one year of their clinical training in rural areas by the time they graduate. For most medical schools, the Rural Clinical School is the regional campus (or campuses) for a metropolitan medical school.
The Rural Clinical School (RCS) at the James Cook University School of Medicine and Dentistry was announced by the Honourable Tony Abbott, Federal Minister for Health in December 2005, on the occasion of the first graduation. Prior to this, informal program investment from the Department supported the initial expansion of clinical teaching capacity at Mackay, Atherton, Mount Isa and other locations.
JCU is the full medical course located in northern Australia and is distinguished by its regionalised delivery and a strong emphasis on rural, remote, Indigenous and tropical health. Every JCU student spends at least 20 weeks of their training in small rural and remote communities (Rural Remote Metropolitan Area classification 4-7). Over half the students spend the last two clinical training years in the regional population centres of Cairns and Mackay (RRMA 3).
For this reason, the model of Rural Clinical School for JCU developed in consultation with the Department of Health and Ageing is also a little different. The RCS can be considered as the distributed rural clinical teaching infrastructure that supports longer rural and remote clinical teaching across years 4-6 of the course. This includes 8 week rural attachments in years 4 and 6 for all students as well as years 5 and 6 for the group of students based at Mackay and Cairns. Rural and remote clinical teaching hubs are located in Mackay, Atherton, Mareeba, Mount Isa, Proserpine, Thursday Island and other locations.
A particular feature of the JCU RCS model is a high degree of engagement of local communities and healthcare providers in the learning experience and student support. Strategies that are applied to support consistency and cohesiveness include regular engagement of the rurally-based clinical academics as a group in workshops and teleconferences, ‘whole of year’ teaching sessions, centrally developed learning resources, use of web-based teaching and common assessment tools.