Major medical conference on tap

Starting Tuesday, hundreds of delegates from around the world will converge on Northern Ontario for a major medical conference.
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine is hosting a six-day world conference — Rendez-Vous 2012 —which will see 850 delegates from 45 countries share experiences in community participation in education, service and research.
The delegates, who will include 150 health professionals, will explore topics related to rural, remote and underserviced health care; social accountability as it relates to health professional education; and engaging the community in educating future health care professionals.
The conference will allow delegates to visit community partners Nipigon, Wawa, Manitoulin Island, Sioux Lookout, Sudbury and Cochrane.
Rendez-Vous 2012 is not like any other meeting before it, as it brings several world health and medical education organizations, and annual conferences together for the first time.
Rendez-Vous 2012 will bring together the Wonca World Rural Health and The Network: Towards Unity for Health annual conferences, as well as the next NOSM/Flinders conference on Community Engaged Medical Education, the Consortium for Longitudinal Integrated Curricula, and the Training for Health Equity Network, organizers said.

(Note: This story was published in the Friday, Oct. 5, 2012 edition of The Chronicle-Journal.)