Amazon Telehealth Program: the Medical Rural Internship Program

Medical Rural Internship
University of Amazonas - Faculty of Health Sciences
Department of Collective Health - Module of Social and Preventive Medicine

Objectives:

The rural internship for medical students is part of the last year activities of the course on Preventive and Social Medicine and has the following objectives:

To give a general overview of the main health problems of the population in the hinterland of the Amazon State, mainly in small cities, rural zones, and indigenous and aboriginal populations of the region;
To enable the future physician to solve the local problems in a critical and creative way, with an ethical and humanistic vision which makes possible the interaction with the population, at the same time respecting its beliefs and cultural values.
To give an opportunity to develop a critical sense and the knowledge which is needed for the management of health services in the public sector (SUS - Unified Health System of Brazil).
To offer service-oriented training in health care actions to the general population, particularly women, children (in pre-school and school age), teenagers workers and seniors in the isolated rural communities.
To involve the student in the educational actions related to environment, health and social control of SUS by means of lectures and courses to the population.

Teaching Load:

660 hours, distributed a long 73 days, 8 hours per day. Rotation of two medical students per county, in two-month continued stays.

Expected Results:

It is expected that the students during the internship contibute to reach the following results during the stay:

Improvement in the quality of the health care services to the population in the county using adequate technology;
Helping with the construction of a health care model which is coherent with the available resources in the city.
Development of strategies of cooperations between the instituitions and user groups for the identification of needs and priorization of health care actions.
The development of multidisciplinary workplans, with the objective of improving the living conditions of community based on family health programs.