Rural and remote areas of British Columbia face many challenges in delivering quality healthcare services, such as rapidly growing, ageing, and diversifying populations, combined with a shortage of healthcare professionals. These communities need health professional graduates to meet increasing workforce demands. But while student enrollment in health professional programs across BC continues to grow, the numbers of supervisors and students in rural and remote placements do not keep pace.

To help address these challenges, UBC Health worked with health partners over the last year to develop an action framework for Rural Education Acceleration and Collaboration in Health (REACH). REACH is intended to build placement capacity across the province by connecting health students with high quality rural and remote clinical placements and supporting preceptors to provide strong mentorship to students.

In October, the project culminated in Going Rural: Enhancing Practice Education, a virtual collaborative health education symposium on practice education in rural and remote areas of BC. The symposium launched the REACH Action Framework, which provides an approach for engagement and includes a broad range of collective actions for rural health partners to improve the assessment, development, design, implementation, and monitoring of rural practice education. 

To address the challenges and deliver enhanced rural health services, we require collaboration and coordination of all health partners, and REACH has started the process with an attitude of collaboration that includes all members of the partnership pentagram...

The symposium brought together nearly 100 health partners with roles in facilitating the delivery of practice education in rural and remote areas of BC. Partners included health professionals, health authority and government staff, academic institution faculty and staff, and community members. After participants learned about the framework and lessons learned, they engaged with each other to identify and discuss collaborative opportunities to move the framework towards collective action. 

“To address the challenges and deliver enhanced rural health services, we require collaboration and coordination of all health partners, and REACH has started the process with an attitude of collaboration that includes all members of the partnership pentagram—which is essential to achieving change,” says Dr. Carl Whiteside, family physician, former Rural Training Coordinator in the Department of Family Practice at UBC, and rural education consultant to the Rural Coordination Centre of BC. “The initiative aligns with the rural health service and delivery changes that are actively being implemented across the province, such as collaborative and interprofessional service delivery.”

Since the symposium, UBC Health has synthesized the proposed priorities and actions identified by participants and distributed a survey to rural health partners to gauge their interest in further exploring and collaborating on the actions. UBC Health will then help rural health partners connect with each other to develop and implement priority actions.

For more information about REACH or to get involved, visit the REACH Action Space.

The partnership pentagram is a model that calls for the active contribution of key health partners in setting up a sustainable health services delivery system based on people’s needs. It identifies five principal partners: policymakers, health professionals, health administrators, academic institutions, and communities. (Adapted from World Health Organization. (‎2000)‎. Towards unity for health: Challenges and opportunities for partnership in health development). 

Posted December 9, 2021