Emotional responses to COVID-19 stressors increase information avoidance about an important unrelated health threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic, like other crises, has had direct and indirect impacts on individuals, many of which have been negative. While a large body of research has examined the impacts of COVID-19 on people's lives, there is little evidence about how COVID-19 affects decision-making broadly. Emotional responses to COVID-19-related stressors, such as illness and income loss, provide a pathway for these stressors to affect decision-making.

The personalities of most medical students are suited to rural practice: Implications for rural education program recruitment.

The success of rural longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) programs has contributed to our understanding of selecting and training students for rural practice. Studies have explored the personality traits of students who participate in rural LICs although few have compared them with classmates who have not. The purpose is to compare personalities of four successive cohorts of students in the LIC Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP) with their non-RPAP classmates.

Personality profiles of rural longitudinal integrated clerkship students who choose family medicine.

Background And Objectives: Physician workforce projections fuel interest in addressing the shortage of family physicians. Copious research has investigated personality as a variable influencing specialty intention. Medical school rural longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) nurture interest in family medicine.

Toward a global understanding of students who participate in rural primary care longitudinal integrated clerkships: considering personality across 2 continents.

Purpose: Medical schools worldwide have developed rural primary care immersive experiences to nurture students' interest in future rural careers and address workforce shortages. Few studies have looked at the students who participate in these programs. This study explores personality traits in US and Australian students who undertake rural-focused medical training.

Surgical skills acquisition: performance of students trained in a rural longitudinal integrated clerkship and those from a traditional block clerkship on a standardized examination using simulated patients.

Objectives: Rural longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) programs for third-year medical students provide strong educational curricula and can nurture interest in rural surgical practice. Students learn technical skills in an apprenticeship model. Variability in instruction and patient experiences across sites, coupled with a lack of simulation facilities, raise some concerns about technical skill development.

Profiles of rural longitudinal integrated clerkship students: a descriptive study of six consecutive student cohorts *.

Background: Medical schools worldwide are challenged to address the rural primary care workforce shortage by creating community-engaged curricula to nurture student interest in rural practice.

Aim: To examine the personal characteristics of six consecutive rural longitudinal integrated clerkship student cohorts to understand whom the programs attract and select and thus inform the development of such programs.

Method: A cross-sectional cohort design was used.

Performance improvement in the perioperative system.

Hospital finance leaders should work with their organizations' perioperative leaders to implement a three-step process for identifying projects with the greatest potential for improving quality while reducing costs and increasing revenue. In essence, this process involves mapping the strategy, developing a list of potential projects, and culling projects that cannot reasonably be accomplished with available resources. The extent to which staff resources are available for such projects can best be measured using a simple spreadsheet designed for tracking special assignments of each staff member.

Management of professional boundaries in rural practice.

Purpose: Rural physicians wrestle with professional boundary issues routinely in everyday interactions, and their situation differs from the experience of their urban colleagues. Medical students receive limited exposure to professional boundary management in preclinical training. Increasingly, schools are implementing rural longitudinal clinical clerkships which expose students to rural boundary setting.

U.S. consumers attitudes toward farm animal cloning.

In January 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration concluded "meat and milk from cattle, swine, and goat clones or their offspring are as safe to eat as food we eat from those species now" (U.S. FDA, 2010).

Qualitative differences between traditional and rural-longitudinal medical student OSCE performance.

Background And Objectives: To ensure adequate observation, supervision, and mentoring of trainees, long-term preceptorships or apprenticeships are being reestablished in medical education. Equivalence in academic performance has been demonstrated between longitudinal students in the Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP), who spend 9 months in a rural community during their third year of medical school, and their peers who complete their clerkships at different hospitals and clinics (traditional). We qualitatively reviewed the end of session Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) for both groups and compared their performances.

Is there equivalency between students in a longitudinal, rural clerkship and a traditional urban-based program?

Background: Demonstrating the equivalency between the traditional metro-based clerkships within close proximity to the academic health center and the nontraditional rural preceptorships is important. The University of Minnesota has had a 9-month longitudinal rural elective for third-year medical students for 40 years, the Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP). In the metro area, traditional students rotate through clerkships of 4 to 8 weeks in length.

Efforts to graduate more primary care physicians and physicians who will practice in rural areas: examining outcomes from the university of Minnesota-duluth and the rural physician associate program.

Purpose: To compare practice choices (primary care or specialty) and practice locations (rural or metropolitan) of medical students at the Duluth and Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul; TC) campuses of the University of Minnesota (UMN). In the early 1970s, Minnesota created two medical education programs at UMN to increase the number of rural and primary care physicians: the first two years of medical school at UMN-Duluth, where the program focuses on recruiting students who will be rural family physicians, and the Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP) elective, a nine-month, longitudinal immersion experience with a preceptor in a rural community.

Learning professionalism during the third year of medical school in a 9-month-clinical rotation in rural Minnesota.

Background: Professionalism is now an explicit part of the medical school curricula.

Aim: To examine the components that are part of developing professionalism during the Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP) experience, a 9-month rotation in a rural community during the third year of medical school.

Methods: Two researchers analysed 3 years of essays for themes.

The rural physician associate program: the value of immersion learning for third-year medical students.

Context: Changes in health care and new theories of learning have prompted significant changes in medical education. Some US medical schools employ immersion learning in rural communities to increase the number of physicians who choose to practice in these areas. Founded in 1971, the rural physician associate program (RPAP) is a longitudinal immersion learning experience for students during their third year of medical school.

Primary care in Minnesota: an academic health center's perspective.

Although Minnesota's overall supply of primary care physicians is as good as or better than that of many other states, Minnesotans in some rural and urban communities do not have ready access to primary care. Simply training more doctors using the current model is not a viable solution to this problem. In order to increase the supply of primary care physicians, the state, its educational institutions, and its health care provider organizations will need to develop new educational opportunities, explore new models of care, and create viable systems for health care delivery for all Minnesotans.

Field demonstration of DNAPL dehalogenation using emulsified zero-valent iron.

This paper describes the results of the first field-scale demonstration conducted to evaluate the performance of nanoscale emulsified zero-valent iron (EZVI) injected into the saturated zone to enhance in situ dehalogenation of dense, nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs) containing trichloroethene (TCE). EZVI is an innovative and emerging remediation technology. EZVI is a surfactant-stabilized, biodegradable emulsion that forms emulsion droplets consisting of an oil-liquid membrane surrounding zero-valent iron (ZVI) particles in water.