Prof Kichu Nair ¹

Editor-in-Chief

I am pleased to introduce volume 8 of the Health Education in Practice Journal (HEPJ).

The Journal is growing from strength to strength, thanks to the collaborative work between our Editorial Board and our Editorial Team. The continuous publication model has been well received and the time from submission to publication has been positively impacted. We open this volume with four upcoming publications.

Australian health care depends on a rural workforce and any practice should be driven by research generated evidence. David Schmidt and Kerith Duncanson provide a critique on the rural research capacity building program they have been running for over 10 years. This program encourages rural clinicians to become involved in developing, implementing and managing a research project. This article provides foundation for future refinement of this capacity building program.

It is well known now that teamwork in health care will lead to better patient outcomes. Zugna et al explores the value of interprofessional education leading to better clinical governance and safety in rural maternity services.

Paramedical staff are the first to arrive in any emergency and our lives depend on them. Their training is vital. In their paper on Transforming paramedic training with virtual reality, Purse et al explores the utility of virtual reality training for paramedics.

For any medical student, transition to internship is a challenging phase of their training. This may be helped by clinical clerkships and the Assistance in Medicine program. The paper from Mitchell et al on Evaluating the Impact of the Assistant in Medicine (AiM) Program on Medical Workforce Efficiency and Preparedness in NSW, Australia, describes this program in detail. It was well received by the medical students and interns alike.

I hope you enjoy and learn from these articles as much as we did.