community-based medicine

[4paw]

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I'm impressed with initially hearing about the programme you're developing. It's not just an 'mph add-on'. It addresses what has long been a gap in medicine - i.e. a lens of analysis that includes the social field, social and group and community health. the whole concept could challenge very narrow definitions of health, and defend the broad definition of health from the W.H.O. There are so many of us over in anti-oppression work and social services, some who have become doctors, some who are becoming now, some who haven't, who would welcome this kind of work. you'll be developing a discourse that is challenged by the 'apolitical' argument, as in medicine should be apoliticial and this is political. yet, that in itself is a political statement with consequences. and I always had more the norman bethune than the william osler as my heroes.

if you do this well, you'll pioneer how the education itself can help with providing doctors to rural and remote areas - rather than just distance ed and selecting folks from the rural/remote areas hoping that they will choose to stay.

those you graduate will know oklahoma best, no matter where they come from. will you accept folks who want to develop within the context of oklahoma and take this knowledge back to for instance other places in the states or rural/remote canada? do you have an indigenous recruitment? do you have a way of working with indigenous knowledge?

i'm fascinated. all the very best.