Student academic performance in rural clinical schools: The impact of cohort size and competition.

Objectives: The Deakin University School of Medicine commenced in 2008 as a rurally focused medical school in south-eastern Australia. This research was designed to examine the effectiveness of the school's adoption of small regional clinical school settings.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study of the first two cohorts of students was employed to assess academic performance at each of five geographically dispersed clinical training sites, with varying student cohort sizes.

International medical electives undertaken by Australian medical students: current trends and future directions.

Objectives: To estimate the proportion of students in Australian medical schools who undertake international medical electives (IMEs), particularly in developing countries, and to ascertain which medical schools provide predeparture training and postelective debriefing.

Design, Setting And Participants: Extraction of data on the number of students undertaking electives from the Medical Schools Outcomes Database (MSOD) for the 2013s 2006 to 2010; and interviews with the directors of each medical school in Australia in May to July 2012 to ascertain the availability of predeparture training and postelective debriefing.

Main Outcome Measures: The proportion of medical students undertaking IMEs overall and within developing countries and the proportion of medical schools with optional and mandatory predeparture training and postelective debriefing.

Rural longitudinal integrated clerkships: lessons from two programs on different continents.

Introduction: Flinders University in Australia has had a rural longitudinal integrated clerkship for selected medical students, the Parallel Rural Community Curriculum, since 1997. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) in Canada introduced a similar clerkship for all NOSM students in 2007. An external evaluation of both programs was conducted in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

Meeting the challenges of training more medical students: lessons from Flinders University's distributed medical education program.

Objective: To use data from an evaluation of the Flinders University Parallel Rural Community Curriculum (PRCC) to inform four immediate challenges facing medical education in Australia as medical student numbers increase.

Design, Setting And Participants: Thematic analysis of data obtained from focus groups with medical students undertaking the PRCC, a year-long undergraduate clinical curriculum based in rural general practice; and individual interviews with key faculty members, clinicians, health service managers and community representatives from 13 rural general practices and one urban tertiary teaching hospital in South Australia. Data were collected in 2006 and re-analysed for this study in January 2009.