In 2005, the year that students at Northern Ontario's new rural medical school are supposed to finish their first year, James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, will graduate its first class.
The schools are groundbreakers in their respective medical communities — both are the first stand-alone medical schools launched in several decades and both are the first to concentrate primarily on rural medicine. North Queensland, like Northern Ontario, is a huge, sparsely populated area with a large Aboriginal population. The main difference is that Queensland boasts a tropical climate.
Most of Australia's 11 medical schools already operate rural campuses, but the James Cook School of Medicine is the only fully independent rural medical school. Dean Richard Hays says it was finally created in Townsville, a city with 140 000 residents, “after about 30 years of community and professional pressure.”
The proposal was enthusiastically supported by rural doctors, their communities and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine. “We remain impressed by the school's continued commitment to affirmative action and its rural health roots,” says Marita Cowie, the college's CEO.
But not everyone was happy when plans for the school were announced. “We were initially received with cynicism and resentment from the other schools,” says Hays. It didn't help that the government took resources from existing schools to build the new one.
Initially, detractors told Hays that he would be unable to attract either faculty or a full complement of students, but the faculty includes both academic and rural clinicians and more than 700 students applied for admission when the school opened in 2000; the original 64 places have increased to 80. “We recruit nationally, yet over 50% of our students are from designated rural areas and 10% are indigenous — well over the 25; rural quota imposed on all medical schools and the 5 places the school originally set aside for indigenous students.”
Hays says the 6-year curriculum is similar to that in the country's other schools, but James Cook places more emphasis on indigenous, rural/remote and tropical health issues. There is a mandatory course in rural, remote and indigenous medicine in year 2, and year 4 concludes with an 8-week rural attachment. Students are assigned a rural physician mentor, and a large network of clinical preceptors provides rural placements for core clinical rotations. Hays believes that a large percentage of his graduates will choose to practise in rural areas because of their training.
That won't be known for 3 more years, but the school (www.jcu.edu.au/school/medicine/) says it will have been successful if it produces graduates with “a special focus” on the issues most relevant to people in rural and remote parts of northern Australia. It also wants its graduates to look beyond Australia to consider the health concerns of people throughout the wider Asia–Pacific region.