This Roundtable session will tap into the collective experience of female rural general practitioners (GPs) and provide an opportunity to collaboratively contribute recommendations to policy makers with the aim of increasing the recruitment and retention of a female rural generalist workforce. Fewer female new graduates take up rural practice even though the proportion of women in medicine is increasing. Policy makers have not accounted for female needs and interests in the design of training, recruitment and retention strategies.

Participants will be briefed with existing research on factors influencing female-specific rural medical workforce training and participation around the world. They will then work collaboratively in small groups to identify solutions to enabling women’s work in rural areas, building positive exemplars. Together this work will inform strategies for enabling growth of the female rural GP workforce.

The use of personal narrative and lived experience will generate creative and novel solutions and reconnect participants with colleagues from across the world and revive the passion that exists amongst rural primary care practitioners for their work and communities. The result will be a draft position paper that can be used to advocate female-focused training, recruitment, and retention strategies.

1. Recognise the approach to recruitment of female GPs to rural areas needs to change in order to improve attraction and retention.
2. Identify barriers preventing female GPs from moving to and remaining in rural areas.
3. Identify novel solutions and policies that will promote the recruitment and retention of the rural female GPs.
4. Discuss the importance of connection and shared passion in strengthening the rural female GP workforce.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the world’s most deadly diseases responsible for over 1 million deaths annually. In recent years, COVID has opened the eyes of many people in more economically developed countries to how an increasingly connected world leaves us all vulnerable to the spreading footprint of disease. Furthermore, the changing climate is likely to result in increased severity of risk factors for TB transmission potentially bringing TB to new places and with larger numbers then seen before. Combating TB requires not only timely and effective treatment but cooperation between regional allies.

This professional forum will explore how TB is managed, and how the understanding of both domestic and regional considerations are important against its spread. The presenters will also be invited to give their thoughts as to potential future challenges in the fight against TB and how these challenges can be met. Primary care physicians are at the front line of managing infectious diseases both in endemic and outbreak environments. Treatment of TB should remain a priority globally even in places and for doctors who would not have historically thought of TB as a threat.

1. Discuss how TB is managed in different parts of the world
2. Discuss the role of primary care physicians in the fight against TB
3. Identify future environmental and social changes that may result in increased transmission of TB.