Rural longitudinal integrated clerkships: lessons from two programs on different continents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Flinders University in Australia has had a rural longitudinal integrated clerkship for selected medical students, the Parallel Rural Community Curriculum, since 1997. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) in Canada introduced a similar clerkship for all NOSM students in 2007. An external evaluation of both programs was conducted in 2006 and 2008, respectively. The aim of this article was to analyse the similarities in and differences between these two rural programs and determine key factors that could inform others interested in creating similar programs. METHODS: The evaluation took the form of a cross-sectional descriptive study conducted in each school using focus group and individual interviews, involving students, faculty, preceptors, health service managers and community representatives. Interviews were analysed for emerging themes based on a grounded theory approach, and common themes were tabulated and validated. The themes for the two sites were compared and contrasted to assess similarities and differences. RESULTS: Individual interviews were conducted with 87 people at Flinders and 39 at NOSM; focus groups included 45 students at Flinders and 7 at NOSM. All participants felt that the programs produce confident and skilled students. The educational value of the programs was expressed in terms of continuity of care, longitudinal exposure, development of relationships, mentoring, team work, and participatory learning. Common concerns related to issues of standardisation, ensuring exposure to all specialist disciplines, communication, support for students and preceptors, isolation, dealing with personal issues, and the process of site selection. CONCLUSIONS: The rural longitudinal integrated clerkship approach to teaching the core clinical components of the undergraduate medical curriculum has a positive impact on both students and clinicians, as demonstrated in two different sites on two continents. Five key factors emerged that may inform development of similar programs in other institutions: (1) invest in careful site selection matching local epidemiology with curricular goals; (2) create collegiate faculty development that facilitates peer to peer relationships between rural and urban faculty; (3) integrate IT systems with the health system to create hardware synergies; (4) manage student expectations regarding isolation and expected site differences; and (5) build strong local postgraduate training that reinforces the values and workforce benefits of the undergraduate program.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".