Education for Health disseminates work consistent with the mission of The Network: Towards Unity for Health (TUFH), a global consortium of health professions schools and individuals committed to improving education of the health workforce and focused on responsiveness to the needs of communities they serve.

Vol. 37 No. 4 (2024): Oct-Dec 2024 - Volume 37 - Issue 4

Looking back to maintain our forward trajectory

Declarations at the end of a TUFH annual meeting are hard to write and easy to forget. It’s easy to forget what came the year before – we are often so focused on creating anew that we don’t look back at what we declared after previous conferences.  We are trying to do better.  The declaration that emerged from the Ubuntu 2024 conference which brought TUFH and Rural WONCA together continues the theme of community wellness through attention to people, place, and policies.  Community remains a consistent throughline from previous declarations – working with, working in, and working for.  Thanks to the joint conference sponsorship with Rural WONCA, we continued the focus on rural communities that started with the Thunder Bay meeting in 2012, an emphasis that was reinforced in the Vancouver declaration that came out in 2022 and was amplified in the Sharjah declaration that emerged last year.

The goals presented in Thunder Bay 2012, Vancouver 2022, Sharjah 2023, and Ubuntu 2024 have been consistent:

  1. Community engagement: Communities must be part of generating solutions to their own health care needs and enabled to be actively involved in implementing these solutions. Developing community capacity to engage with policy development through supporting locally led social innovation in health initiatives and continuous learning processes is essential.  
  2. Equity in rural health: Based on the principle of equity, we need to prioritize rural issues as we restructure the health system towards realizing health for all. We should aim to produce practitioners likely to work in underserved communities by assisting students in these communities to obtain sufficient primary and secondary education to be able to enter health professional training.
  3. Educate the health workforce in context: recruit students from underserved communities and train them in generalist practice and primary health care. Deliver health services by locally based health care teams wherever possible.
  4. Create social and health policies for the public good: Accreditation should include measurement of responsiveness of institutions to the needs of their communities. Universal coverage can strengthen health systems and lead to improved access.  And community-led approaches can co-create policies and solutions that reflect the needs of marginalized communities, including women, rural populations, migrants, indigenous peoples and disabled people.

Many of the papers in this issue support these themes: impact of rural placements, models of education in the community, workplace education of pharmacy students in Nepal, community immersion of dental students, impact of covid on vulnerable populations, and a theoretical perspective on teamwork.  Several other articles are indirectly related: the use of virtual reality in education of dental students, of caregivers of patients with dementia, and as an adjunct to other simulation tools.  Also in this issue are papers on professional development of Japanese women in medicine, professional identify of underrepresented students, and academic support of students.

I suggest we revisit the Ubuntu declaration and the others that preceded it throughout the year and hold ourselves accountable for the lofty ideas they present.  As stated in the conclusion of the Ubuntu declaration, we challenge readers to work with The Network: TUFH and Rural WONCA individually and through their local organizations to align education, policy and systems innovations with these key goals.  Then analyze the evidence, draw your inferences and disseminate the knowledge through publication in this and other journals.  Let’s not forget the goals we wrote in years past so we can maintain our forward trajectory.

Bill Burdick

Co-Editor

Published: 2024-12-11

Impact of rural and remote clinical placements on future intention to practice

Elizabeth Dening, Joseph Vernon Turner, Tobias Speare, Miranda Batten, Andrew P. Woodward, Mary-Jessimine A Bushell

287-295

Pharmacy students' work-based learning experiences during in-plant training: a qualitative case study in Nepal

Harish Singh Thapa, Suresh Gautam, P Ravi Shankar, Bhuvan Saud, Rakesh Shrestha

326-334

I’m in! So why don’t I fit in? A cross-sectional exploration of imposterism within medical school cohorts

Chantel Clark, Amy Clithero-Eridon, Cameron Crandall, Marlene Ballejos

335-343

Dental education in India: perceived learner impact of community immersion on social awareness

Pushpanjali Krishnappa, Jyotsna Sriranga, Malu Mohan, Anita P Sagarkar, KM Shwetha

345-351

Supporting medical students through time and space – creation of a longitudinal academic support system

Meredith Niess, Kelly Smith, Erin Bakal, Animesh Jain, Gita Fleischman, Kunal Patel, Christina Shenvi

377-382

Attendance at live vs virtual didactic sessions in a U.S. emergency medicine residency

Spencer Tomberg, William Dewispelaere, Adane Wogu, Nannan Wang

383-388

Perspectives of female medical students and physicians on professional development in Japan

Hinako Sudo, Seri Kojima, Kiko Hayashi, Sakura Hosoki, Arisu Tanaka, Rintaro Imafuku

389-395

Student-led symposium on patient-centered reproductive healthcare

Lauren Oliver, Sarah Beth Bell, Christen Jarsaw, Ian Peake, Supriya Kohli, Eli Forst, Baylee Stevens, Abigail Campbell, Kayla Stromsodt, Isha Jhingan, Kathyrn Lindsay, Alexandra Regens

396-401

Attitude of dental students toward role of virtual reality in dental education

Sara Bkairat, Judi Samhouri, Teeb Al-Lami, Malak Elayyan, Manal Awad , Vinayak Kamath, Shishir Shetty

402-403

Augmented reality to aid caregivers of patients with dementia

Maryam Moazzam, Meenal Bajwa, Khadija Azeem, Komal Rubab
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Partners:

Education for Health and its parent organization, TUFH, partner with The Woods System of Care and FAIMER to generate and curate submissions on health priority topics related to advancement of quality in health workforce education and community mental health and integrated health for complex care populations. 

The Woods System of Care is a population health management organization that through its network of providers provides life cycle care to meet the lifelong needs of children and adults with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injuries and/or mental health challenges who may also have complex medical and genetic conditions.  The Woods System of Care is a Collaborating Center of Excellence with The Network: Toward Unity for Health and manages The Mollie Woods Hare Global Center for Excellence with expertise in autism, intellectual and developmental health and mental health populations. The Woods System of Care is driven by the understanding that the root causes of health inequity are deep and complex and are attributed to differences in access to healthcare, income, education, race, segregation, and place. Barriers in access to quality, affordable care, along with the double burden of racism and poverty for people who have a disability result in a higher incidence of health disparities and significantly poorer health outcomes. A welcoming environment, highly trained and competent healthcare providers and an integrated care model addresses these disparities and improves health. 

FAIMER is a division of Intealth, an integrated organization that also includes the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG). Through strategic integration of its nonprofit divisions, Intealth brings together expertise and resources to advance quality in health care education worldwide to improve health care for all. As divisions of Intealth, FAIMER and ECFMG share a common vision and pursue complementary missions. FAIMER promotes excellence in international health professions education through programmatic and research activities. FAIMER has trained more than 2,000 Fellows worldwide in partnership with its Regional Institutes; has contributed to the national understanding of the international medical graduate workforce in the United States; and has partnered with many organizations to advance the quality of health professions education. FAIMER Project Reports: Innovations in Health Professions Education are structured reports completed by FAIMER Fellows at the end of the 2-year International FAIMER Institute or FAIMER Regional Institute Fellowship program, based on education innovation projects.