Community and Rural Medicine Introduction
The Department of Community and Rural Medicine seeks to understand the unique issues rural communities face, how those issues affect the quality of health of rural residents, and what can be done to improve health and health outcomes. Department faculty and staff work together with communities to educate future health professionals, conduct research, and provide service. Our students, faculty and staff are deeply involved with communities in efforts that are promoting health, preventing disease and injury, and working toward the elimination of health disparities in rural Alabama.
UASOM – Rural Medicine Clerkship
The mission of the Department of Community and Rural Medicine is to develop and promote a better understanding of the broader social context of health in the community. This mission is realized academically through a focus on health-related issues of Alabama’s population, especially the medically under-served, and of other communities.
One unique opportunity for Tuscaloosa students is that this campus links the family medicine and rural medicine clerkships. Students work with a physician in a rural location to fulfill their family medicine clerkship. Then, choosing a health issue that affects the community in which they have been based, they conduct a community medicine project to complete the rural medicine clerkship.
