Wellcome Trust: Rural medicine witness seminar

News just in of a Wellcome Trust event to be held on January 29th 2010 in London…

“Remote and Rural Medicine (RARM) began to emerge as a medical specialty and as a political force in the final decades of the twentieth century.  The problems of delivering primary and secondary care to remote and rural areas have engaged practitioners and medical educators around the world, in developing, re-structuring and developed countries.

This witness seminar, with participants principally, but not exclusively, from the UK and Ireland, will examine, inter alia, some of the historical issues associated with the development of ‘rural medicine’ as a distinct specialty; the provision and maintenance of resources and services nationally and internationally; and how the specialised educational needs of medical students destined for rural practice have been identified and addressed. The meeting will also discuss the evolution and scope of initiatives referred to as ‘Rural and remote’, ‘Community oriented’, ‘Community based’ and ‘Community engaged’ and the concept of ‘Social accountability’ in medical and health professional education.

Professor Roger Strasser, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, is assisting us with the organisation.

Space is limited, so to register please contact Mrs Wendy Kutner. Tel: 020-7679-8106; Fax: 020-7679-8194; E-mail: w.kutner@ucl.ac.uk.

Please note that all meetings are from 2pm to 6pm and will be held on the 6^th floor at the Wellcome Trust, Gibbs Building, 215 Euston Road, London NW1.

All earlier published Wellcome Witness Seminar transcripts are freely available online at www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/ following the links to Publications.”

RCGP Rural Forum – where are we now?

It’s been a while since posting anything new on the blog.  However, that’s mainly due to lots of things going on in the background as opposed to nothing to report!  The Rural Forum team have been frantically busy over the last few weeks, after the Forum was successfully launched at the RCGP Conference in November.

I’m just back from our latest meeting in London, and over the next week, we’ll mention some of the many issues discussed.

Let’s start with where we’re going from here.  Thanks to everyone who has signed up to the Forum so far.  We now have over 300 members, and this is steadily growing.  We’ll be contacting you soon to detail how the Forum is going to progress over the next few months, and the many opportunities to get more involved.  Key themes include:

• setting up a dedicated College administrator for the Forum
• focussing on colleagues who dispense
• looking at how access to College eLearning can be enhanced for rural practitioners – both by reducing professional isolation via technology, as well as assessing whether there are difficulties in accessing internet speeds fast enough.
• exploring better ways of communicating – including teleconferencing and virtual “video” sessions
• and developing a relevant, useful programme for involvement during 2010.

In the meantime, please feel free to email your stories, comments and feedback to the blog.  We’re hoping to move up a gear to make the blog even more responsive and updated, and we’re always keen for your views, whether a Rural Forum member or not.

And on that last note – if you haven’t signed up yet – find out how by going to http://www.rcgp.org.uk/ruralforum

RCGP Scotland & Rural Forum responds to OOH Inquiry

Several weeks ago the Scottish Parliament Health and Sport Committee opened an Inquiry into out of hours healthcare provision in remote and rural areas.  RCGP Scotland – in partnership with the new RCGP Rural Forum – has formulated a response based on feedback from members.

You can read this response here:

RCGP Scotland Response to Out of Hours Care Provision in Rural Areas

RCGP Rural Forum Launch – presentation now available

You can now view Dr Malcolm Ward’s launch of the RCGP Rural Forum which took place during the RCGP Annual Conference earlier this month.

Unfortunately we have not been able to bring you Professor Hays’ video message, however the key topics from this are summarised in Malcolm’s presentation.

CultivAiTing Rural GPs for the Future

RuralGP is excited to showcase it’s first slidecast.  These are similar to podcasts, except that the audio can be linked up to a powerpoint presentation – so allowing presentations to be shared easily to a wider audience!

This slidecast is recorded from the RCGP Annual Conference during the launch of the RCGP Rural Forum, on Thursday last week.  David Hogg (blog editor) explains some proposed changes to GP Training, and where rural practice stands to gain and lose.   In the next week, we also hope to feature Malcolm Ward’s launch of the Rural Forum, as well as the videolink with Prof Richard Hayes, giving his insights on how the Rural Forum can learn from experiences in Australia.

RuralGP is keen to host other slidecasts.  It’s relatively simple to do.  If you would like to know more about this, please do get in touch.  We hope to share presentations from future events too.  Many thanks to Dr Soleman Begg for his technical expertise, with which this slidecast has been made possible.

Note that you can expand the presentation to full screen for better viewing.  The comments expressed are a personal view, and not necessarily representative of the view of the RCGP or RCGP Rural Forum.

eLearning for Rural Practice

Recently I took part in a teleconference with Malcolm Ward, RCGP Chair of the Rural Form, and Ben Riley, Medical Director for eLearning at the RCGP, to discuss ways of improving access to online CPD to rural practitioners.

There is a lot happening to make more online learning accessible to medical practitioners, particularly as the use of online educational modules is increasingly encouraged to support preparation for appraisal and revalidation.  This is reflected in the scale of work happening under the umbrella of the Department of Health’s “E-Learning for Healthcare” programme (see www.e-GP.org).  Royal Colleges of most specialties are investing heavily to offer their members access to accredited and relevant updates.

The RCGP has a number of ongoing projects, but central to revalidation are the Essential Knowledge Updates which some members may already be familiar with.  These aim to provide RCGP members with a 6-monthly update of the most pertinent changes in practice, via an online learning module.

However, through various conversations, the RCGP Rural Forum is acutely aware that some remote and rural practitioners experience significant difficulty in accessing online content, especially due to slow internet connections.  Judging from recent comments from the telecommunications industry, this is unlikely to change overnight.  And so, if too much reliance is placed on high-bandwidth video and media content for eLearning, this could prevent many of our rural colleagues from accessing this core resource.

What’s the answer?  We’d like to invite ideas!  The Rural Forum is looking into ways of signposting rural practitioners to particular modules of interest, and this could include an indicator of how fast your connection needs to be for certain modules.  We are also looking into other ways of providing access to elearning resources – perhaps via CD-Rom or memory stick.  This is work in progress.

In the meantime we would like to invite your comments, not least to understand the scale of the problem.  If you’re a rural GP and concerned about access to these resources – please get in touch, and contribute to our online poll on this issue – available shortly.

RCGP Rural Forum Officially Launched!

Yesterday the RCGP Rural Forum was officially launched, at the RCGP Conference in Glasgow.

Malcolm Ward presented the background to some of the key aims of the Forum, and Prof Richard Hayes joined us by recorded video from Australia to make some recommendations based on Australian rural practitioners’ experience.  David Hogg explained the GP curriculum – including proposed changes to extend training to five years – and the need for rural input to maintain and promote access to rural careers.

The event was well attended and feedback was positive to move the Forum forward to ensure decent representation of UK’s rural practitioners within the RCGP.

Within the next week, we hope to publish these presentations, as the Forum was able to link-in with the AiT Committee’s pilot scheme to make conference presentations available to those who are unable to attend.

In the meantime, you can keep track of daily conference news via GP’s special conference bulletins.

4 days until the RCGP Conference

In just 4 days time, Glasgow will host the RCGP Annual Conference at the SECC.  Some of the conference events have already been highlighted on RuralGP, and this year looks set to be one of the biggest conferences yet.

As well as an extensive programme for trainees, the conference will see the official launch of the RCGP Rural Forum.  Members of the college should already have received information on how to join, and already many members have signed up.

The key session to look out for is B8 during Thursday afternoon, where members of the Forum will be speaking about some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.  There are other rurally-relevant sessions too, plus the Scottish Clinical Skills Unit – an amazing facility within an articulated lorry – will be in attendance.

We hope to see you there!

Scotland: Enquiry into Out of Hours Cover

The Scottish Parliament’s Health and Sport Committee is inviting submissions to an enquiry regarding out of hours care provision in rural areas of Scotland.

In particular, they are keen to hear views on the following questions:

• What do you think is the most sustainable and cost-effective way to provide adequate out-of-hours services in rural areas?
• What are your views on the quality of out-of-hours care provided in rural areas, in particular clinical safety and effectiveness?
• What are your views on the accessibility and availability of out-of-hours care in rural areas?
• How well do you think NHS 24 and the Scottish Ambulance Service link in with existing out-of-hours services?

These are issues that many readers will already have discussed previously, such as the recent review of the Scottish Ambulance Service response in rural areas.

The RCGP Rural Forum will submit a response on behalf of members, and comments have been obtained from the Yahoo Mailing List, however anyone is free to contribute independently – the deadline for this is November 6th 2009 and further details are available here.

Study: Rural Placements for UK Medical Students

It’s increasingly recognised that rural practice can offer undergraduate medical students excellent learning opportunities, with higher-than-average satisfaction compared with their urban counterparts.  There can be many reasons for this, not least that students are often forced into immersing themselves in the local community, as a rural placement will normally involve staying within the locality, instead of being able to return home from an urban practice which is normally easier to commute to.

Furthermore, there is good evidence that giving students a good experience of rural practice during the early stages of their careers, stimulates a considerable number of them to seriously consider taking up rural posts once more qualified.  That’s certainly the case in my experience, when a fulfilling 5 week placement at the Group Practice in Stornoway made me think more about rural general practice as a career option.

However, how rural practice is offered to undergraduates, is implemented in many different ways across the UK.  Of course, that is no bad thing, but we are starting to better understand the relationship between early student experiences and later career choice.

This piece of research from the IRH considers the rural practice opportunities for students at Keele University, and reports on some of the key findings from conversations with students who have benefitted from such placements.

>> Rural and Remote Health Journal – View Article.