Collaboration for Health Equity through Education and Research (CHEER) Following a meeting with the DG Health and the submission of a Concept Note for the Committee of Medical Deans on the conditional funding of medical student training, the CHEER collaboration, of which Prof Reid is the national Chairperson, were asked in August 2013 by the DDG: Primary Health Care to develop proposals for the re-orientation of medical education in South Africa. Prof Reid,
Dr Couper and Dr Hugo forwarded a proposal to the National Health Council on “Orientating doctors towards primary care and rural medicine: Transforming the training of medical students in South Africa” in order to produce more doctors who were willing to commit themselves to working in primary care and in rural health care. The key proposal suggested offering direct funding to faculties that are willing and able to transform their approaches to medical education in order to address this need, through the strategies of changing the selection and admissions processes; shifting academic orientation from a limited focus on tertiary care to a broader focus, with an emphasis on primary health care at community level; and developing specific training for and in rural contexts, and other underserved areas. Faculty development will be required in order to achieve these goals and the approaches will also need to be extended across the health professions, which would facilitate inter-professional training and team-work. In the long term, faculties could be measured on their ability to produce graduates that meet the specific human resource needs of the country.
