Funding available for continuing medical education in rural communities
The Rural Continuing Medical Education (RCME) Community Program makes funds available to groups of physicians living and delivering care in Rural Subsidiary Agreement (RSA) communities, to address their collective learning needs. The program aims to improve the capacity of local health care systems to address the needs of community members by giving physicians more control over collective learning activities, reducing the challenges of accessing funds, and improving relationships among health system partners.
The Rural Coordination Centre of BC (RCCbc) is implementing the RCME Community program in partnership with rural physician communities and regional health authorities. This work is funded by the Joint Standing Committee on Rural Issues (JSC).
What is the RCME Community Program?
The RCME Community Program addresses the needs of local physicians and their teams for collective learning by enabling activities that strengthen the well-being and capacity of local health systems to address the health care service needs of the community. This frequently involves generalists, specialists and interprofessional learning.
Funds for the RCME Community Program are available to the community of physicians and may be applied to meet collective learning needs, unlike RCME for Individuals which is paid directly to the rural physician to facilitate individual learning needs.
Guidelines
A team to help you
The RCME Community Program’s skilled team of individuals are embedded both in the RCCbc and in regional health authorities. They are supporting rural communities with the implementation of the program, so that your community can receive annual RCME Community Program funding, including:
- help with designing or describing your local RCME Community Program model, including an annual budget;
- help with developing agreements with other communities if you want to include several communities;
- building or adapting policies and processes and anything else you need to have a robust model.
