Keywords: e-learning, continuous professional development, general practitioners, rural medicine

Background:

General Practitioners in rural areas provide health and urgent care often in resource-poor healthcare environments and at times in isolation, deal with high levels of risk and uncertainty and an increasingly rural population with multi-morbidity. They have therefore specific continuous professional leaning needs. E-learning is flexible and easily accessible, involves no travel and is as effective as more traditional learning.
After a successful oral presentation at the EURIPA Rural Forum in 2024 in England, the RCGP in the UK, the RCGP Rural Forum and WONCA EURIPA joined forces to start exploring how these specific learning needs can be partially addressed using e-learning. Two surveys were distributed- one as part of the evaluation of a successful RCGP webinar on emergency care in rural primary care and one among EURIPA members through the newsletter and google-group.

Aim of the study:

The survey was designed to start sharing experiences and preferences concerning e-learning of rural GPs to discover consensus themes.

Methodology:

Survey

Results:

The survey among RCGP members post-attendance of the webinar on emergency care in rural primary care was filled in by 96 GPs. 26 EURIPA members replied to the survey after it being promoted through the newsletter and google-group. Most respondents identified there was currently no provision of rural-specific e-learning, they prefer to spend from 20 to 50 minutes on e-learning, prefer e-learning modules, podcasts, webinar with an interactive element and online lectures. Subjects they mostly want to see covered (clinical and non-clinical): emergency care, mental health/addictions, managing uncertainty and risk, multi-disciplinary working, frailty, telemedicine and near-patient diagnostics, and community orientation/social prescribing.

Conclusions:

The surveys identified gaps in continuous professional development resources for rural GPs. Further research in specifying what these gaps are and how best they can be addressed is needed but based on the findings opportunities to develop and disseminate rural-specific e-learning CPD are being explored.