Australian and New Zealand medical education for rural practice

Abstract

Australia has experienced a division of traditional general practice into the more procedural rural workforce rep-resented by the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, which is not exclusively general practitioners, and the established Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Gov-ernment initiatives for over a decade have fostered student education in Rural Clinical Schools and University Departments of Rural Health, so there is now considerable infrastructure of academics, clinical teaching sites, re-search programmes and student ac-commodation throughout rural Aus-tralia. Medical education is spreading away from tertiary urban hospitals into community-based education, and the reaction to the knowledge explosion is resulting in an emphasis on under-standing rather than rote learning and preparing medical students as generalists with potential to differen-tiate after graduation.