Oct-Dec 2024 - Volume 37 - Issue 4
Vol. 37 No. 4 (2024)
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Jun-Sep 2024 - Volume 37 - Issue 3
Vol. 37 No. 3 (2024)
This issue of Education for Health is aligned with our annual meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, held in collaboration with Rural WONCA; the theme is People, Place, and Policy for Community Wellness. In many ways, this issue is emblematic of those concepts. People are the focus of refugee eye care, and “seeing people, not patients, a strength based approach to asset mapping” which emphasizes the humanity in the individuals we care for. Place features prominently in the piece on the ravages of war in Sudan on the lives of medical students, in the determinants of community oriented medical education, in the staircase model of community involvement, and in the medical education of US citizens in Cuba. Policy is broadly represented by the innovative education methods presented in tele-urgent care, flipped classroom, and gamification papers.
Mental health papers are starting to appear in this issue with a piece on student mistreatment, and imposter phenomenon and depression. In future issues, we would like to see papers about the mental health of the people we care for in our communities.
If you are reading this at the conference in South Africa, consider the ways in which the papers in this issue contribute to your insights about people, place, and policy and their relation to community wellness. If you are not at the conference, join the conversation through reading and responding with your own submissions, and your letters.
Bill Burdick
Co-Editor
Mar-Jun 2024 - Volume 37 - Issue 2
Vol. 37 No. 2 (2024)
Thailand, Iran, Sudan, and Brazil are represented in this issue with reports on rural recruitment, educational environment, a new teaching tool, and the impact of war. Repeated studies, including one in our next issue, demonstrate the predominance of authors from high resource countries in academic publications. We continue to encourage authors from the rest of the world to submit their work so our readers get a more balanced view of the state of health workforce education.
A commentary from Guest Co-Editors, Sailaja Musunuri and Tine Hansen-Turton from Woods Services, provides global context for our new series on mental health. Advances in neurophysiology provide better diagnostic and treatment options but they may be thwarted by stigma and access issues that deter people in need from getting help. Voices from all corners of the world need to be heard on these issues.
Efficient manuscript processing is the key to a vibrant journal. The average number of days from submission to acceptance for Education for Health is 49, a dramatic improvement from a year ago, and in keeping with industry standards. Our reviewer team is doing valiant work providing timely feedback to authors, and they could use your help to offset the workload. We would particularly like to see more published authors from this journal volunteer to become peer reviewers. If you are interested, contact me directly at drwburdick@gmail.com.
Finally, Payal Bansal will remain a Co-Editor but she is taking a well deserved sabbatical after many years of service to attend to other responsibilities. We look forward to her return.
Bill Burdick
Co-Editor, Education for Health
Jan-Mar 2024 - Volume 37 - Issue 1
Vol. 37 No. 1 (2024)
Several papers in this issue focus on social accountability – perceptions of education staff and students, use of storytelling to achieve deeper understanding, and implementation of new education tools. A related paper addresses education about planetary health in low- and middle-income countries. In addition, we describe the new 2024-2027 TUFH Strategic Plan which highlights social accountability.
We go beyond social accountability with a pair of papers on influences on career pathways - one looking at high school students and the other at early medical students. Another set of papers on education innovations addresses impact of active learning methods, reverse role simulation, and virtual shadowing. Our practical advice paper offers lessons learned in development of mission and vision statements.
With 3 Commentaries, 6 Research papers, 1 Student Contribution, 1 Practical Advice Paper, 2 Brief Communications, and 2 Letters to the Editor, there is a lot to digest. If you have comments on any of these papers, please send us your letters!