Abstract
Health indicators for rural populations in Australia continue to lag behind those of urban populations and particularly for Indigenous populations who make up a large proportion of people living in rural and remote Australia. Preparation of health practitioners who are adequately prepared to face the ‘messy swamps’ of rural health practice is a growing challenge. This paper examines the process of learning among health science students from several health disciplines from five Western Australian universities during ‘Country Week’: a one-week intensive experiential interprofessional education program in rural Western Australia. The paper weaves together strands of transformative theory of learning with findings from staff and student reflections from Country Week to explore how facilitated learning in situ can work to produce practitioners better prepared for rural health practice.
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Notes
CUCRH is one of 11 University Departments of Rural Health (UDRH) in Australia and the only UDRH in the largest state of Western Australia.
The names of the towns have been changed.
Cultural security, as defined by Coffin (2007), is a higher level than the notions of ‘cultural awareness’ or ‘cultural safety’. It directly links understanding of cultural difference (awareness) to policies that address that understanding (safety), and are then actioned in a suite of best care practices for the client/patient.
Interprofessional education refers to active learning in which two or more professions learn with, from and about each other (Freeth et al, 2005). Effective interprofessional education leads to better interprofessional practice in health care teams, ultimately improving the health outcomes of individuals and communities (WHO 2010). It is a feature of rural health care provision because of the breadth of rural practice, reduced access to health services and providers, and a focus on primary health care approaches (Bourke et al., 2004).
To protect confidentiality, all individual names, where they appear, have been changed.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the communities in the Midwest without whom, Country Week would not be possible. We would also like to acknowledge the community teachers, the health professionals, the Shires staff and workers, and present and former staff at the Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health, particularly Judy Riggs, Amanda Fowler of Edith Cowan University, and Simon Forrest from Curtin University for their pedagogical contributions to Country Week over the years.
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This work was conducted while Sarah Prout worked at the Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health, The University of Western Australia.
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Prout, S., Lin, I., Nattabi, B. et al. ‘I could never have learned this in a lecture’: transformative learning in rural health education. Adv in Health Sci Educ 19, 147–159 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-013-9467-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-013-9467-3