Despite recent expansion of Veterans Health Administration (VHA) care sites and health profession training sites, critical health care professional shortages remain and limit access to care for Veterans. High quality clinical training environments in rural locations are essential to the development of workforce pipelines, as trainees are more likely to work in a rural location if they were exposed to these settings in training. However, establishing new training opportunities at rural sites can be challenging for busy clinical staff. Many rural clinicians have limited experience with teaching or program development.

To alleviate this barrier to rural health profession education expansion, the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) in partnership with the Office of Rural Health (ORH) launched the Rural Interprofessional Faculty Development Initiative (RIFDI) to build capacity for, and quality of, rural health professional through targeted faculty development. In doing so, the aim is to improve trainee recruitment and faculty retention in rural practice.

The RIFDI program began enrolling the first cohort of rural educators in 2019 with a two-year curriculum. Forty-four participants enrolled, representing 23 clinical sites geographically spread through the country. Initial results from the first cohort of the program are promising, despite the impacts of COVID.

We will describe the initiative and outline early findings and challenges. We will also discuss lessons learned in moving an interprofessional faculty development program to the virtual environment due to impacts from COVID-19. Finally, we will describe best practices in developing an interprofessional faculty development program.