Impact of a 20-year collaborative approach to increasing the production of rural doctors in Thailand

Shortage and maldistribution of the health workforce has remained an important concern for health systems in many countries.1-3 In Thailand, different government interventions and efforts mostly through increasing production from major medical schools were successively put in place over the second half of 20th century mainly to address rural-urban uneven distribution and internal brain drain.4 Albeit such development, Thailand’s doctor shortage remained critical, with an approximate doctor density of 0.3 per 1,000 population in 19945 and 865 medical graduates produced in that year.4 Since 1994, two new governmentfunded projects primarily aimed to increase the production of rural doctors, called the Collaborative Project to Increase Production of Rural Doctor (CPIRD) and One District One Doctor (ODOD) program, have been employed through collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH). This paper describes the establishment, strategies used and the impact of the two special projects on production of doctors in rural areas.