June 15, 2016
Students benefit from Tairawhiti challenge
The University of Otago has won international recognition for a programme where it sends medical students to Gisborne and Wairoa.
A study on the five-week Tairawhiti Interprofessional Education programme have just been published in the journal BMC Medical Education.
It found participants were significantly more able to work well with each other, understand rural health and Hauora Maori and were more confident in caring for people with chronic long term conditions than classmates who had not done the programme.
Associate Professor Sue Pullon, the programme director and study leader, says being put in an environment with limited resources and a large Maori population was a wake up call for many students, who came from the dental, dietetic, medical, nursing, pharmacy and physiotherapy courses.
"They have really had little idea of how difficult things like transport can be to access services, how there are not the range of services that are available in a larger hospital and often the students have little idea of how you have work around those issues and how much wider scope the health professionals have to have in the smaller areas," Dr Pullon says.
The programme has led to many of the students applying for jobs in the area when they finish their training.
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