Delivering high-quality, emergency medicine education to rural practitioners and their teams for over 15 years, the Rural Coordination Centre of British Columbia’s CARE course has been consistently rated amongst the best. But what are the secrets to its success?

This week we interview its creators Dr. Jel Coward and Dr. Rebecca Lindley, both rural family docs based in Pemberton BC, on how delivering education that meets learners where they are, understands their reality and recognizes their humanity, provides the best learning environment possible.

Links:

Rural Coordination Centre of BC - The CARE course

RCCBC Rural Continuing Medical Education Programs

The CARE course

Link: RCCbc Rural Health Conference

Medicine at the Edge (Part 1) - If you’re ever tempted to think medicine is practiced the same everywhere in British Columbia, think again. Small rural communities present specific challenges to healthcare delivery due to their size and location, no more so than in the North where we also have long, snowy winters to contend with.

That’s not to say that rural care can’t be high quality care. Providing valuable insights into rural family practice is today’s guest Dr. Ray Markham. This interview was so good we split it into two separate episodes. In this first part, Ray talks about his rural, generalist practice in Valemount, how to promote good teamwork and the unsung benefits of working in rural medicine.

Links:
Partnership Pentagram
RCCbc

Continuing Medicine at the Edge (Part 2) - In the second part of our interview with Northern rural family physician Dr. Ray Markham, we discuss some of his leadership work supporting rural communities across the province through the Rural coordination centre of BC. We discuss how to build a provincial support network and how the constraints of geography and remoteness can be turned to advantage by fueling innovation to improve care “at the edge”.

As overfilled hospitals everywhere are struggling to cope with a busy winter of respiratory disease and influenza, many in healthcare are calling for a more “upstream” approach to preventing Emergency Department visits and hospital admissions. But intervening upstream is more difficult than it sounds. Today’s guests have done just this. Talking us through their award-winning, quality improvement work in reducing ED visits and hospital admissions for patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease are Donna Jouantapp, Lina Alsakran and Dr. Zoe Pullan from Cowichan on Vancouver Island. In this interview, we learn how a well-designed project with a dedicated, inclusive and nimble team can overcome obstacles on the path to sustainable, cost effective and patient-centered care.

Links:
The INSPIRED COPD Outreach Program and COPD Care and Education Nova Scotia

Listeners will be familiar with the physician-led healthcare quality improvement work featured on this podcast, but they may not be familiar with how this work is formally supported at the Provincial level. In this episode, we interview Cindy Myles, the Vice President of the Specialist Services Committee, who gives us a primer on British Columbia’s unique, Joint Collaborative Committees and the importance of multipartite collaboration when addressing healthcare’s “wicked” problems. We hear how collaboration generates more sustainable change and how, during this challenging time for healthcare delivery, working together to improve the system can bring us hope for healthcare’s future.

Links:
SSC News
The Exchange, a database of quality improvement projects supported by SSC and the Shared Care Committee
JCC Website