Bridalfalls, Grampians
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Education

Rural Doctors are an intrinsic part of the system for the education of Australian medical graduates. They also operate complex arrangements for the training and ongoing education of rural medical practitioners.

Rural doctors have since the mid 1980s been developing these systems.

University rural health units led on to the creation of rural University Campuses, many experienced rural doctors moving on to be university teachers. It is now recognized that rural experience improves the quality of Australian medical graduates. The involved universities are Monash, Melbourne, Deakin, and from outside the State, Charles Sturt and Flinders.

From short term attachments, students now spend up to a year in individual locations, and small satellite campuses are being set up all over the State. These campuses are vertically integrated with postgraduate training processes in the same locations.

Rural doctors developed the concept of postgraduate medical curriculum, working first from 1992 through the then Faculty of Rural Medicine of the RACGP to produce advanced curricula, and from 1997 through the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine to further develop training of rural doctors to Fellowship level in keeping with the complexity of their work. The RACGP has also taken a step towards dedicated rural training with a rural Diploma, which from 2007 is being developed into a rural Fellowship.

Rural Doctors operate Victorian regional training programs responsible for postgraduate training. These are Victoria Felix ( Bendigo), Bogong (North-East), Get-GP (Gippsland) and Greater Green Triangle (Warrnambool). Registrars are trained in rural locations.

As well as recruiting and initially financing them, Rural Doctors also have the onus of training overseas doctors, 30% of the Victorian rural medical workforce, to fellowship level, an enormous commitment in addition to all their other work.

It is further planned to place future Australian medical graduates as first and second year residents in rural hospitals and practices. These will also require guidance and training.

Rural doctors also organize and conduct a large amount of continuing professional development.

For the above reasons, rural practice locations are now being described as ‘education centres’.