Many factors enhance rural physician identity development and influence whether physicians enter, remain in, and thrive in rural practice. To help trainees and young physicians develop the professional identity of a rural physician, multifactorial medical training approaches aimed at encouraging long-term rural practice should focus on rural-specific clinical and nonclinical competencies while providing trainees with positive rural experiences.

Community-based education of health profession students has increased dramatically, yet providing faculty development to a large, dispersed, and diverse population of community-based faculty is challenging. The authors describe lessons learned from 1997 to 2000 in developing, using, and disseminating a collection of preceptor development materials designed to be relevant to community-based faculty and easy to use. These activities were carried out by the Preceptor Development Program, which was developed by the Mountain Area Health Education Center of Asheville, North Carolina, which works with over 500 community preceptors of health profession students and medical residents. The program includes materials on nine core faculty development topics in a variety of formats: seminars, monographs, Web modules, and one-page summary "thumbnails." Faculty developers can download these free, customizable materials from the Web and are encouraged to adapt them for their own use.