Where medicine meets community: inside Rural Week

Dalhousie’s Rural Week gives first-year medical students a unique opportunity to step beyond urban training environments and experience health care in communities across the region—from regional centres to small rural hospitals and clinics. 

In this story series, we explore Rural Week, taking place at the end of May, through different perspectives: a physician and program leader, a medical education leader, and students whose experiences helped shape their understanding of medicine. Together, their stories highlight the complexity, challenges, and rewards of rural practice and why it matters. 

Opening the door to practicing rural medicine

For Dr. Osama Loubani, Assistant Pre-Clerkship Dean at Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine, the importance of Rural Week begins with timing. 

“First-year students are just beginning to form their professional identities,” he says. 

At that stage, early exposure plays a powerful role in shaping students’ understanding of medicine. And because medical schools are often rooted in large, urban teaching hospitals, that environment can quietly become the default. 

“If we don’t intentionally step outside that highly specialized setting, it automatically becomes the students’ baseline for what medicine looks like,” he explains.  

Dr. Loubani believes that early rural exposure ‘pops that bubble’ and normalizes rural practice, showing students the incredible breadth and depth of what rural physicians do before students start siloing themselves into specialized tracks.” 

Rural Week is designed to do exactly that: interrupt assumptions before they take hold. The reality students encounter often challenges what they expect. 

“A rural doctor might deliver a baby, manage a complex multi-system trauma in the ER, and round on inpatients, all in the same day,” Dr. Loubani says. “Students often don’t realize the courage and resourcefulness required to practice effectively when you don’t have an OR suite and MRI scanner down the hall.”  

What begins as exposure quickly becomes a shift in perspective, not just about rural medicine, but about the health-care system itself. 

“It moves their understanding of the healthcare system from theoretical to practical,” he says. “Seeing care delivered across the full continuum in one place helps students recognize that rural physicians must be sophisticated, critical thinkers.” 

Medicine in community

For Dr. Loubani, some of the most important lessons extend beyond clinical care. 

In rural communities, health care is deeply intertwined with daily life and is shaped by factors like transportation, employment, and social support. He hopes students begin to see not just the physician’s role, but their place within a broader community. 

“I want them to see the physician’s role as a community leader,” he says. “And to recognize the social determinants of health in action. How transportation, local industry, and community support networks directly impact patient outcomes.” 

Those connections also create something increasingly rare in modern medicine: continuity and trust. 

“Most importantly, I want them to experience the profound privilege of treating generational families and the deep trust that rural communities place in their healthcare providers.” 

A responsibility to communities

Rural Week is not just an educational experience; it reflects Dalhousie Medicine’s responsibility to the communities it serves. With much of Nova Scotia and the Maritimes made up of rural communities, that responsibility is clear. 

“We are not just training doctors in a vacuum; we are training doctors to serve the specific health needs of our populations,” Dr. Loubani says. “If we aren’t actively exposing our students to these communities and preparing them to practice there, we are failing in our responsibility to the province.” 

That commitment extends beyond a single week. Initiatives such as the Cape Breton Medical Campus, with its focus on rural family medicine, and Dalhousie’s growing Distributed Medical Education program are part of a broader effort to train physicians in and for the communities that need them most. 

Planting the seed 

For many students, Rural Week is their first meaningful exposure to rural life and practice. 

“You can’t be what you don’t see,” Dr. Loubani says. “So, this early, positive exposure plants a seed.” 

Even for those who ultimately pursue careers in urban centres, that perspective stays with them. They become consultants and colleagues who understand the realities their rural counterparts are facing when they call for help. 

At the heart of Rural Week are the physicians and communities who make it possible. 

“None of this would be possible without the rural preceptors who open their clinics, hospitals, and sometimes even their homes to our students,” Dr. Loubani says. “They are the true champions of this program.”