Current Preceptors
Welcome new and returning preceptors to the RUOP program! We thank you for your commitment to teaching our medical students and we appreciate all of your efforts to make this a great learning experience for these future physicians. Please explore the information below and reach out to us at somrural@uw.edu if you have any questions. Our goal is make sure you feel prepared to teach your RUOP student and integrate them into your clinic and community.
Resources to review before the student arrives at your clinic:
- Preceptor Information Sheet (will be emailed to you in the spring)
- Current Skill Level of Rising MS2 Students document (will be emailed to you in the spring)
Additional resources:
- Teaching with Telemedicine Visits
- Telehealth Teaching Resources
- WWAMI Faculty Appointments
- WA- King & Pierce County Faculty Appointments
Learning Environment resources:
A positive learning environment for all students is a high priority for Rural Programs and UWSOM. Issues related to discrimination – particularly witnessing and experiencing harmful microaggressions – negatively impact not only academic performance, but also the personal well-being of students. The resources below provide more in-depth information on the impacts of bias in medical education, and offers insight into strategies to advocate, intervene, and address such instances in a clinical environment:
- The Impact of Racial Bias in Patient Care and Medical Education
- Responding to Racism, Discrimination, and Microaggressions
- Addressing Microaggressions in Academic Health
- Becoming Active Bystanders and Advocates
Student Scholarly Project Examples:
RUOP Preceptors are not expected to help students with their scholarly projects (they have a separate UWSOM Faculty Mentor for this), though students sometimes appreciate guidance on identifying relevant community health topics and/or possible community partnerships based on their project topic area.
The Scholarly Project is the graded portion of RUOP that fulfills the student’s Independent Investigative Inquiry (Triple I) requirement for UWSOM. Students spend 5-10 hours per week outside of clinic time working on this project through step-by-step assignments and finalize their project into a poster that they present at their Foundation Campus’s Poster Symposium in November.
The project focuses on understanding how change occurs in a community medicine setting and allows the student to explore what resources their RUOP community already has available, as well as what could be done to advance community medicine regarding an issue that is relevant to their specific RUOP community. Projects vary widely in topic and focus, but you can view some examples from our 2025 RUOP cohort in the document below.