Capability ... what's in a word? Rural Doctors Network of New South Wales Australia is shifting to focus on the capability of rural health professionals.

Rural health services, and the workforces that provide those services, are under unprecedented pressure due to insufficient health workforce numbers and distribution of health workforce weighted to urban areas. This creates health service access issues in rural areas, compounding existing health inequalities between rural and urban people. Many approaches to date have aimed to rectify these issues, with moderate success.

The Australian Medical Schools Assessment Collaboration: benchmarking the preclinical performance of medical students.

Objectives: To report the level of participation of medical schools in the Australian Medical Schools Assessment Collaboration (AMSAC); and to measure differences in student performance related to medical school characteristics and implementation methods.

Design: Retrospective analysis of data using the Rasch statistical model to correct for missing data and variability in item difficulty. Linear model analysis of variance was used to assess differences in student performance.