Table 3 Guiding principles

A shared vision: all stakeholders across all levels recognise the need to work towards a shared vision for distributed training as a catalyst for good quality, relevant health professions training addressing the health care and human resources needs of the country.

Social accountability: orientating the training of students towards the health needs of the community in order to foster the development of socially accountable health care workers who are motivated to work in underserved areas once qualified.

Continuity: immersed, longitudinal, distributed training in and with communities, fostering continuity of learning and relationships with health services, managers, health care teams, trainers, staff, training institution(s), students, patients/clients and the community.

Responsive adaptability: continuous renewal and adaptation of curricula, training methods and approaches, ensuring they are flexible but achieve educational equivalence in different settings so as to be responsive to community and health system needs.

Integration: fostering an integrated approach to learning, a curriculum that merges clinical and public health approaches and promotes inter-professional learning and collaborative practice across disciplines and various levels of care.