Reviewing academic coordination on the rural distributed training platform in South Africa.

Introduction: Distributed training of students from a variety of health professions is increasing in South Africa because of the type of learning it offers and that it caters for the increasing number of students being accepted into health sciences programs. Challenges and facilitators to distributed training are well documented in the literature, and include increased distance from the academic home, human resources for health challenges, student access to support systems, and identifying learning environments to match learning outcomes. In the case of the Rural Clinical School in the Western Cape, South Africa, 'academic coordinators' were employed on site to fulfil the role of coordinating and supervising student learning and community engagement.

Transformative learning through participation: experiences at a rural clinical training site in South Africa.

Background: Distributed training has been cited as an opportunity that offers transformative learning experiences in preparing a future workforce to address local needs. For this reason, rural and longitudinal placements are increasingly being adopted by medical schools across the world. Place, participation and person are considered integral in the process of transformation of medical students into responsive graduates on the distributed platform.

Training for Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges for Health Workforce Sustainability in Developing a Remote Clinical Training Platform.

In 2018, Stellenbosch University's Ukwanda Centre for Rural Health led a faculty initiative to expand undergraduate health professions training to a new site, 9 hours drive from the health sciences campus in the sparsely populated Northern Cape Province of South Africa in the town of Upington. This is part of a faculty strategy to extend undergraduate health sciences training into an under-resourced part of the country, where there is no medical school. During 2019, the first year of implementation, four final year medical students undertook a longitudinal integrated clerkship at this site, while final year students from other programmes undertook short 5-week rotations, with plans for extending rotations and including more disciplines in 2020.