25 years of training doctors at WSU: how - Walter Sisulu University

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WC GP FS KZn nC MP EC nW LP
Number of medical practitioners per 10 000 population by region (2004) (Breier and Wildschut, 2006)
Our first strategy to address the need for serving rural communities was to deliberately select
majority of our medical students from rural areas, mainly from the Transkei, but also from
‘Border’ and KZN.
WSU medical graduate demographics (Kwizera and Iputo, 2010)
% at W SU % 2001 census
Black 71.67 79.00
Asian 26.06 2.50
Coloured 1.48 8.90
W hite 0.81 9.60
Female 51.14 52.18
Male 48.86 47.82
This policy was based on the belief and expectation that medical students with rural origin
were more likely to serve rural communities after qualification 40-42 . International studies have
since demonstrated strong rural origin-rural practice correlation 43-46 , and a similar trend was
reported from South Africa a few years ago by de Vries and Reid 47 . At WSU, we are still
analysing the relevant graduate data, but preliminary findings indicate that our strategy of
rural recruitment has worked very well. For example, out of the 571 WSU-trained doctors