Harvey Will, Van Schaik Lachlan, Develyn Tamekha, Ali Zahra, Hogarth Cathryn, Wright Julian
Department of Rural Health, The University of Melbourne, Shepparton, VIC, Australia.
Department of Rural Clinical Sciences, La Trobe Rural Health School, Wodonga, VIC, Australia.
Front Med (Lausanne). 2025 Jul 21;12:1585017. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1585017. eCollection 2025.
Australia faces a persistent shortage of doctors in rural and regional areas, exacerbating health disparities between urban and rural communities. Traditional medical education models, which have been largely centralized in metropolitan areas, often result in rural-origin students needing to relocate to cities for training, thus disrupting community connections and reducing the likelihood of their return to rural practice. To address this challenge, the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University have collaborated to establish Victoria's first end-to-end rural medical pathway, an innovative model that enables students to complete both their undergraduate ["Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Medical)"] and Doctor of Medicine (MD) entirely within regional and rural settings. This paper explores the implementation, practical considerations, and evaluation mechanisms of the end-to-end rural medical pathway, highlighting its place-based curriculum, and fully distributed medical education model. Although this program is yet to be evaluated, it is intended that by embedding students in primary care clinics and regional hospitals throughout their training, the program will foster long-term professional and personal ties to rural communities. This initiative represents a scalable and evidence-based model for addressing rural medical workforce shortages, offering insights that could inform national and international medical education policy.
澳大利亚农村和偏远地区长期面临医生短缺的问题，这加剧了城乡社区之间的健康差距。传统医学教育模式大多集中在大城市地区，往往导致来自农村的学生需要搬到城市接受培训，从而破坏了社区联系，并降低了他们回到农村行医的可能性。为应对这一挑战，墨尔本大学和拉筹伯大学合作建立了维多利亚州首个端到端农村医学路径，这是一种创新模式，使学生能够在地区和农村环境中完成本科阶段的[“生物医学科学学士（医学）”]和医学博士（MD）课程。本文探讨了端到端农村医学路径的实施情况、实际考量因素和评估机制，重点介绍了其基于地点的课程设置和完全分布式的医学教育模式。尽管该项目尚未进行评估，但通过让学生在整个培训过程中融入基层医疗诊所和地区医院，该项目旨在培养与农村社区的长期专业和个人联系。这一举措代表了一种可扩展的、基于证据的解决农村医疗劳动力短缺问题的模式，提供了可为国家和国际医学教育政策提供参考的见解。
