BC’s 1900 rural physicians will soon have access to rurally relevant CME/CPD in their own communities.

A new Rural Continuing Professional Development (R-CPD) Outreach Program was recently launched by UBC’s Division of Continuing Professional Development, with support from the Rural Coordination Centre of BC. The R-CPD program will work with rural physicians to build relevant CME/CPD programs for rural physicians. “There are huge advantages to learning in situ,” says Dr Rebecca Lindley, a rural family physician, member of the R-CPD Medical Advisory Committee, and co-principal investigator on the BC Rural Physicians Continuing Professional Development/Continuing Medical Education Needs Assessment (see article in this issue).

The needs assessment helped identify barriers to participation in rural CME/CPD activities. Rural physicians find it difficult to obtain locum coverage to travel and attend conferences and events far from home. These physicians have asked that rural phy­sicians be the educators, and that education happen closer to home. The needs assessment also identified topics of interest to rural physicians. Top priorities include emergency medicine, obstetrics, gyne­­cology, and psychiatry.

The R-CPD will integrate with existing rural physician education programs, create new rurally relevant educational programming, and make content more rurally relevant when presented on these topics in non-rural settings.

“The UBC Division of CPD wants to help support rural physicians in their varied roles as professionals, teachers, and members of their interprofessional health care teams by looking for innovative and collaborative approaches to educational programming. We are open to all ideas,” says Dr Bob Bluman, assistant dean, CPD, practising family physician, and co-principal investigator on the rural CPD/CME needs assessment. “Our rural physicians are the real heroes of our health care system and we want to support the delivery of quality health care by rural physicians by working to provide for their ongoing professional learning needs.”

To register for education programs, please see the CPD web site at www.cpd.med.ubc.ca [9]. For more in­formation about the R-CPD, and for rural physicians to become involved, please contact Ms Deirdre Maultsaid at deirdre.m@ubc.ca [10].

—Deirdre Maultsaid, Project Manager, Division of Continuing Professional Development, UBC