Rural learning is more than marks: sensitised to knowledge

Twenty-five percent of Western Australian medical students must undertake a full year of their clinical training in rural areas. This training must be up to standard and substantial evaluation is undertaken to ensure equity with metropolitan trained students.

To determine whether students considered themselves sufficiently and satisfactorily prepared for their sixth year of medical studies after studying in rural areas in their fifth year.

Selected students were interviewed 12 months after completion of their rural study. Open ended questions were asked, interviews taped, transcribed, themes selected and compared back to the data for confirmation and expansion of the concepts.

The rural experience was experienced as offering a lot more than the straight city training. Students moved from theoretical knowledge (knowing what they were taught) to a new way of experiential knowing that had consequences for their subsequent learning, clinical behaviour and attitudes.

The current model of tertiary hospital teaching aims to give students as wide a range of clinical experiences as possible with consequences that clinical variety and volume of experiences necessarily comes at the expense of longitudinal exposure to both patient care and collegial relationships. Students sensitized to such knowledge felt a strong emotional connection to rural life.