Required of all first-year medical students. This interdisciplinary course addresses basic communication skills that are utilized by health professionals. The course focuses on data gathering skills, development of rapport, listening skills, and empathic and facilitative responses. Principles of interpersonal, family, group and interdisciplinary communication strategies are addressed. Students begin to address ways to reconcile differences in expectations between patients and health care providers.

Rural Case Oriented Learning and Preceptorship 2 (Spring Semester)
A continuation of Rural Case Oriented Learning and Preceptorship I, this course continues to emphasize personal life-long education by addressing learning issues identified from rural community and clinical patient encounters.  Students explore issues of health promotion and disease prevention.  Emphasis is placed on the case oriented learning process as well as disease management in rural communities.  The course includes clinical experiences coupled with in-depth evaluation of rural patients with common diseases.  Clinical experiences are reviewed with peers and faculty through group discussion and self-directed information acquisition.  Topics complement material covered in the basic medical sciences curriculum.

This interdisciplinary course with nursing, medicine and public health students is the first of a two semester series of courses which allows students to develop an understanding of the practical application of community based and participatory research methodology and theory relevant to health sciences by developing proposals for community health projects and specific plans to assess achievement of objectives.  Students develop an understanding of interdisciplinary working relationships among health professional disciplines.  Students will develop an understanding of issues associated with research involving human subjects and receive IRB Training.  They attain an understanding of data collection methods for research and evaluation purposes and develop data collection instrument(s) as necessary to analyze health status indicators using appropriate technology.  The course includes an online component on theory and research methodologies using community experience as part of assessment/research activity.