New funding available for continuing medical education in rural communities
A new program is being launched by the Joint Standing Committee on Rural Issues (JSC). The Rural Continuing Medical Education (RCME) Community Program will make funds available to groups of physicians living and delivering care in Rural Subsidiary Agreement (RSA) communities, to address their collective learning needs.
The Rural Coordination Centre of BC (RCCbc) is implementing the program in partnership with rural physician communities and regional health authorities.
What is the RCME Community Program?
The RCME Community Program refers to activities that address the needs of local physicians and their teams for collective learning:
- it strengthens the well-being and capacity of local health systems to address the health care service needs of the community, so it involves generalists, specialists and interprofessional learning.
- it is different than RCME for Individuals which the JSC defines as “medical education to update and enhance skills and credentials for rural practice.”
- RCME Individual funds are paid directly to physicians, and RCME Community Program funds are available to the community of physicians.
A team to help you
RCCbc is currently working with rural physicians and health authorities to develop structures to support this new program. The implementation will be led by a skilled team of individuals within the RCCbc and regional health authorities.
Our role is to help you complete the requirements for implementing, so that your community can receive annual RCME Community Program funding, including:
- Help you design or describe your local RCME Community Program model, including an annual budget;
- Help you develop agreements with other communities if you want to include several communities;
- Build or adapt policies and processes and anything else you need to have a robust model.
The following shows an overview of the vision and goals of this exciting new initiative and how it will help communities to address their collective learning needs:
