Recruiting and Training a Health Professions Workforce to Meet the Needs of Tomorrow’s Health Care System :

To determine the role of rural background and years of rural clinical school training on subsequent rural clinical practice.

Accumulating evidence suggests that effective communication and interpersonal sensitivity during interactions between doctors and patients impact therapeutic outcomes. There is an important need to identify predictors of these behaviors, because traditional tests used in medical admissions offer limited predictions of "bedside manners" in medical practice. This study examined whether emotional intelligence would predict the performance of 367 medical students in medical school courses on communication and interpersonal sensitivity. One of the dimensions of emotional intelligence, the ability to regulate emotions, predicted performance in courses on communication and interpersonal sensitivity over the next 3 years of medical school, over and above cognitive ability and conscientiousness. Emotional intelligence did not predict performance on courses on medical subject domains. The results suggest that medical schools may better predict who will communicate effectively and show interpersonal sensitivity if they include measures of emotional intelligence in their admission systems.

To determine whether completing a year of the Rural Clinical School of Western Australia (RCSWA) program is associated with entering the rural medical workforce.