Keywords: eLearning, continuous professional development, blended learning, app development, user experience, knowledge transfer, rural communities

Justification:

For rural GPs, the delivery of continuous professional development and its outcomes, both for doctors and their patients, are affected by major challenges, including isolation from colleagues and secondary/tertiary centres. The unique attraction (and downside) of rural medicine is its vast scope: it's not only traditional f2f general practice at the office, but frequent house calls and nursing home visits, but for some practitioners also admission and ongoing care of in-hospital patients, emergency medicine, obstetric medicine, as well as procedures such as ultrasound, anaesthesia and minor surgery. Patients are different as well, with completely different health seeking behaviour and beliefs, compared to urban patients.

Objective:

To keep up to date, rural practitioners need excellent continuous professional development, covering all aspects of their practice (i.e.farming medicine, zoonotic diseases, first line emergency psychiatry). In this workshop I suggest we (the participants) collate the existing CPD offer available for rural practitioners and then determine the gaps.

Organisation:

A room with a digital or analog whiteboard will suffice. An overhead projector would be great.

Participation:

All members of the conference invited: medical students, trainees, nurses, established rural GPs, academics, educationalists

Expected outcomes:

Development of a collection of existing resources and more importantly a wish list for resources that not yet exist: this can be the basis of a discussion paper to request funding for further online CPD from regional/international organisations targeted at rural practitioners.