Rural generalist medicine: a developing approach to health care in rural and island Japan.

Introduction: Despite universal health coverage and high life expectancy, Japan faces challenges in health care that include providing care for the world's oldest population, increasing healthcare costs, physician maldistribution and an entrenched medical workforce and training system. Primary health care has typically been practised by specialists in other fields, and general medicine has only been certified as an accredited specialty since 2018. There are continued challenges to develop an awareness and acceptance of the primary health medical workforce in Japan.

Evaluation of postgraduate rural medical training programs and implications for rural workforce development: a systematic review.

Introduction: Providing postgraduate rural training programs has been recognised as central for successful recruitment and retention of medical workforce. While there have been many documented cases of rural training program development, documented program outcome evaluations are few. This review investigated how postgraduate training and educational programs for rural and remote medicine are evaluated worldwide.

Development of the Rural Generalist Program Japan: meeting the needs of Japanese rural communities.

Context: There is a worldwide shortage of physicians, which is worse in rural areas, with a large underserved rural and remote population. Most jurisdictions in countries of all income levels report shortages of rural doctors, often exacerbated where primary care is not strong. Japan is not an exception: Japanese specialist-driven approaches in medical education and public health have resulted in disproportionate distribution of medical services in the country.