Development of an educational program to improve skills for preventing, diagnosing, and treating non-communicable chronic diseases for final-year medical students in rural and urban communities

Background: The e-Learning with flipped classroom approach educational program is an alternative to online learning (e-Learning) and face-to-face learning for addressing the challenges related to long-distance skill training. Methods: Consisting of weekly live-time virtual sessions with expert physicians, available resources including updated guidelines, review articles, and blog interactions between colleagues for discussing the clinical cases to improve learning techniques. The availability of all the content (recorded lectures and bibliography) at any time for review is an important aspect for easy learning. This multimodal approach was directed to medical students working in rural communities to get the necessary skills for preventing, diagnosing, treating, and improving the quality of care in non-communicable chronic diseases (NCCD). In addition, this model includes a pre and post-course evaluation, a quality of care test, and a dropout and satisfaction survey. The students who obtain the approving grade at the end of the course get a certificate with medical endorsement.