Pre-reading and early childhood literacy skills are important for brain development and fundamental to a child's long-term cognitive and social well-being. As such, the fostering of these skills is an important preventive health measure. Family physicians can play key roles in encouraging parents to routinely read with their children. However, in…

I Ola Kohala is an educational pilot project that strengthens opportunities for middle and high school students in North Hawai?i to explore opportunities in higher education and health professions through strengthening cultural identity and civic responsibility. The program is also focused on delivering quality rural health education for health…

For more than two decades, the medical informatics community has worked towards representing evidence-based guidelines in computer code, intended to be executed at the point of care. The purpose is to close the gap between evidence of best medical practices and the care that patients receive. Most informatics work has taken a…

A nationwide project (Physicians Serving Handicapped Children) to provide continuing medical education to primary care physicians who provide office based health care to handicapped children is described. (Author)

The effectiveness of a cost containment curriculum integrated into a required 6-week community health-primary care clerkship at Brown University is described. A computerized patient management problem was administered to half the students in order to assess its discrete effect on the students. (MLW)

Describes three state-initiated programs that address the challenge of providing access to health care for Appalachia's rural residents: a traveling pediatric diabetes clinic serving eastern Kentucky; a telemedicine program operated out of Knoxville, Tennessee; and a new medical school in Kentucky dedicated to training doctors from Appalachia for…

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, begun in 1969, was developed to allow selected physician clinicians to acquire skills not part of the usual physician's repertoire. The emphasis has included demographic, epidemiologic, economic, social, organizational, humanistic, anthropological, cultural, and ethical problems. (MLW)

Five papers cover various aspects of the Macomb (Illinois) 0-3 Regional Project, a home based program for rural handicapped and high risk infants and toddlers. The first examines ways to develop public awareness of the importance of early intervention through media and contact with medical, school, and community professionals. The second paper…

Rural areas have difficulty attracting physicians, and they also send fewer students to medical schools than do urban areas. A program at the University of Washington's medical school known as WAMI--for Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho--is trying to combat that problem. (MLW)

Colorado's area health education program, the SEARCH program, designed to alleviate the maldistribution of health manpower, is described. It recruits new professionals to underserved areas through student/resident rotations and retains those professionals already there by providing accessible continuing education. (Author/MLW)

In an effort to make the geographic distribution of physicians closer to the distribution of the population as a whole, in 1971 the states of Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho (WAMI) established the WAMI Program. The results of the first seven years of the program are described. (Author/MLW)

This report describes a program initiated in 1992 to provide appropriate training for rural physicians and to address the shortage of physicians in rural Australia. Rural medical practice differs dramatically from urban practice in that there is limited access to specialist services in rural areas, thus requiring rural practitioners to be…

Careers that combine medical research and patient care should be described to students early in medical school. Opportunities for research training in M.D.-Ph.D. programs, the program offered by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the NIH postresidency physician-scientist programs are discussed.…

The primary goal of the migrant health project in San Patricio County, Texas was to establish out-patient family health care for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Several accomplishments were made. By using a physician assistant, the clinic was able to add an additional work without the necessity of extending their hours. The dental services have…