Deborah Phillips,

SIU School of Medicine &

Quincy Family Practice Center

Quincy, IL

www.ruralfamilymedicine.org is the official Website of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM), with over 800-1,000 links. This is a compiling of a lot of the information that we try to teach our residents, such as many of them might not even know the NRHA is NRHA, how to get a hold of it, where do you find it, and what does it do? We link to the Web page and to the advocacy and discuss that. When I got into rural several years ago, there were a whole bunch of acronyms for things, and if you are in the group, you can talk about them. This was "okay, I don’t know a whole lot; I want to start out with what we are looking at." We divided it into four sections: "About Rural America," "Rural Community," and "Health Information Resources." I don’t know if you are all aware of it, there are rural research centers out there that that is all they do is research on policy and on problems of rural. They are excellent, but if you don’t know if they exist, it is hard to find them. Many of them have Websites.

Under "Rural Health Systems," we go through several of the health systems and have some papers listed for our residents to look into. I am always happy to receive more papers and more links that we can put in there. The last part is a "Clinical Topics." We use this to decrease professional isolation and increase retention. So how do you do that? An example of being out in a rural area is having somebody with massive exposure to some sort of pesticide. If you have not thought of this before, you go look in the two major medical textbooks. This actually happened to us out there, so what we ended up doing was running down to the chemical place and copying the material safety data sheet and trying to read that because the copy machine was not the best. We were trying to figure out what was going on with this person because it was an unusual pesticide that he used. We are under our "Clerical Health Topics" under Chemical. It points to the Florida Web page, which is kept up by the County Extension Office. There is a pesticide handbook, and it is a huge amount of data. So anytime that we find stuff that we think would make our lives easier as rural physicians, we try to put it on the Web.

The next part of this is "Teaching," and a lot of the stuff that is here and that was said in Chicago is placed under Issues of the Pipeline, and we will upload some more of this information and all these papers that they have cited as being excellent papers, they will be put there and will hotlink it so that you can pull the abstract down, send it to your library, and get a copy of it. This is a year old, that’s it, so we are still on our learning phase. We hope to use it to decrease when you are out in a rural community, one of the main reasons that people give for leaving is that they don’t have anybody to share with their professional excitement over cases; that is where list serves or chat rooms for the physicians occur. Also, it helps to bring the resources to the physician if they have the Internet access.

So, visit our Website, and most of the information will be up there. Then, if you have any comments, just send us stuff. Once again, I am from academia, and I think I know what my residents need, but each time I go through this, I find something else that is not on my list.