The Rural Area Project (RAP) in Thailand: curriculum development

Abstract

The Rural Area Project is a collaborative developmental project of Chulalongkorn University and the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand. The main objective of the project is to increase the number of doctors in the country in such a way that they would be posted in rural districts and have appropriate knowledge, skill and attitude for rural practice. Curriculum development for the project has been carried out to serve the project objective as well as to ensure that the project graduates are accepted as qualified doctors. Several principles and assumptions have been used as strategies in the developmental process. They include co-operative participation in curricular planning, systematic formulation of educational objectives, organization of common courses, utilization of existing health services, planning innovative courses in community medicine and general practice, extensive use of self-instructional modules, efficient use of teachers' time and planned gradual delegation of responsibility to students.

Medical education program with obligatory rural service: Analysis of factors associated with obligation compliance

“…There are programs for producing rural physicians in numerous countries; some are contract-binding and others are non-binding [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Some non-binding programs in U.S. such as the Physician Shortage Area Program (PSAP) of Jefferson Medical College and Rural Physicians Associate Program (RPAP) at the University of Minnesota Medical School have been reported to increase the number of rural physicians [35,37,43].…”

Characteristics of medical students with rural origin: Implications for selective admission policies

“…Selective admission policies of medical schools favoring students with rural origin have reportedly been conducted in countries such as the US [2,3], Australia [5], Thailand [6], and Norway [4]. In Japan, 16 medical schools in rural prefectures have a special 'rural quota' in which students from the same rural prefecture are recruited outside the usual open-competition admission [20].…”

“…Medical education is a key component in increasing the number of rural physicians. With the support of national and/or local governments, medical schools in many countries have adopted several strategies to increase the number of rural physicians [1][2][3][4][5][6]. One of the most frequently adopted and supposedly most effective strategies is to offer preference for admission to students with rural origin [2,4,7,8].…”