Previous Research Projects
The Office of Distributed Education is proud to have supported the following projects:
Undergraduate Medical Education in Canada: Supporting and Sustaining Interest in Rural Medicine
Year: 2024
Program: Summer Research Elective
Principal Investigator: Dr. Victor Ng
Students: Danielle Vucenovic, Jillian Sing
Location: London/Hybrid
Project output: Poster presentation at Rural and Remote Medicine Conference 2025
Healthcare access is an increasingly important social determinant of health that more severely affects rural and remote populations. Across Canada, medical schools have been implementing policies, procedures and curricula aimed at encouraging and increasing the rural physician workforce. In the past 10 years, much Canadian data has been published assessing the effectiveness and limitations of these changes at the medical institutional level. This project aims to analyze and summarize the current state of literature on rural medical education in Canada.
Healthcare Career Promotion in a Rural High School Population: A Qualitative Cohort Study of Attitudes and Motivations for Pursuing Healthcare Careers
Year: 2023
Program: Discovery Healthcare
Students: Taylor McCann, Aaron Lewis
Location: Southwestern Ontario
Project output: Poster presentation at the Rural and Remote Conference 2024
An inequitable distribution of healthcare providers throughout Southwestern Ontario services as a barrier to healthcare access for those who live within rural communities. Urban cetnres continue to have the highest healthcare worker to population ratio while rural areas struggle with recruitment and retention.
Discovery Healthcare is a summer camp for high school students facilitated by medical studnts from the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. These camps are hosted in rural communities across Southwestern Ontario and were created with the intention of exposing high school students living within these areas to various healthcare careers early on in their education. The aim of this project is to determine if Discovery Healthcare has an impact on interest in healthcare careers for high school students. 
