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McLaughlin Receives AHEC Innovation Grant for Rural Education Research

Jacqui McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Jacqui McLaughlin, Ph.D.

The North Carolina Area Health Education Centers awarded an Innovation Grant to Jacqui McLaughlin, Ph.D., for a project investigating challenges associated with student rotations in rural clinical sites.

“The primary goal of the project is to define the educational challenges encountered at clinical sites in rural regions and generate potential solutions to address these problems in an effort to increase the number of students rotating to those areas,” said McLaughlin, an assistant professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the director of the School’s Center for Innovation in Pharmacy Education and Research.

Over the last 40 years in North Carolina, there has been a widening gap between number of  rural and urban pharmacists in the work force. In nonmetropolitan counties, there are 25 percent fewer pharmacists per 10,000 people than in metropolitan counties, according to 2012 data from the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research — a gap 11 percentage points higher than in 1979.

Health disparities in rural populations remain a significant obstacle in North Carolina and the United States, but health professions students may not receive or partake in opportunities to engage with this critical population, McLaughlin said.

Rural sites are underused, and the reasons why have not been fully identified or explored, she said.

“Preceptors, experiential education directors and clinical site directors must be equipped to identify actionable solutions to this shortage,” said McLaughlin.

With the $36,923 AHEC grant, McLaughlin’s group will conduct design-thinking workshops at clinical sites in rural regions of North Carolina. The workshops will lead participants through the design-thinking process to address the challenges experienced at clinical sites in rural regions and generate feasible solutions, McLaughlin said.

Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving framework widely applied in other disciplines that enjoys growing popularity in health care and medical education. The design-thinking process typically includes five basic stages:

  1. Empathy or discovery, where the goal is to understand the audience
  2. Define, which involves defining the problem from the point of view and needs of the audience
  3. Ideate, which includes brainstorming to produce as many creative solutions as possible
  4. Prototype, where a potential solution is crafted
  5. Test or evolution, which includes obtaining feedback and other data to inform modifications

“Using design thinking for creative problem solving can help rural health centers optimize their approach to delivering exceptional interdisciplinary education and care,” McLaughlin said.

The research team led by McLaughlin consists of:

North Carolina AHEC provides education programs and services for state health care professionals across nine regional centers with a focus on underserved populations.

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