Interdisciplinary teaching in rural settings to enhance multidisciplinary team care : the RIPL effect

One challenge lies in how to teach effective teamwork and collaboration skills to medical students to ensure they are workplace ready. At the Bathurst Rural Clinical School (RCS) of Western Sydney University's School of Medicine, we strive to nurture an interest in rural practice in our cohorts of medical students who complete an extended clinical placement in the region and are accountable for contributing to an increase in the rural medical workforce. Students are typically "highly urbanized" and have little prior exposure to life outside of metropolitan city living. The RCS curriculum aims to provide a positive and authentic rural experience and at the same time correct any incorrect notions about what it is like to live and work in a rural community. The end result, ideally, being to foster rural practice aspirations in students, or at least open them up to the possibility of a future rural career by giving them a lived experience and removing the element of the unknown.