Educating Doctors for the North: a session at the UArctic Congress 2026

In May I travelled to Tórshavn for the UArctic Congress 2026, hosted by the University of the Faroe Islands and held alongside the Ocean Connectivity Conference. This was the largest international gathering the Faroe Islands have hosted, bringing close to 1,400 delegates from around 50 countries to venues across the capital. The theme, “Healthy Humans and Oceans in the Arctic”, placed human health on an equal footing with the ocean science that more usually dominates Arctic meetings, and that gave a medical educator a natural place in the programme.

I was there to convene a session with Professor Robert Scully of the University of Galway on a problem that Scotland shares with communities right across the circumpolar North: how to build and keep a generalist medical workforce in rural, remote and northern places. The doctors who serve these communities are mostly generalists, and these are among the hardest posts to fill anywhere in the world. Our question for the session was whether medical education itself can be part of the answer. 

We brought together four programmes, from Ireland, Scotland, Norway and Canada, and arranged them as a developmental sequence. Professor Scully opened with a new graduate-entry programme being designed at Galway, built around social accountability and the principle of educating doctors “of the region, by the region, for the region”. I followed with ScotGEM, Scotland’s distributed graduate-entry programme, which has now graduated its first cohorts and can show that students trained across rural NHS boards intend to stay, and are as well prepared as their peers elsewhere. Professor Ingrid Petrikke Olsen of UiT The Arctic University of Norway presented a decade of register data following graduates’ careers, and Dr David Pontin described Canada’s first circumpolar family medicine residency in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories.

The four told a coherent story. Selecting students of rural and northern origin is consistently linked to rural and northern practice later on, and immersive training in those settings builds both familiarity and intention without compromising readiness. The Norwegian data added a sobering note that only longitudinal evidence can supply: over ten years, many graduates still drift towards urban specialist careers, so retention, and not selection alone, is the harder and longer task. Perhaps the most valuable outcome of the session was the recognition that these programmes have a great deal to learn from one another, and we left intending to form an international community of practice to keep the conversation going.

It was encouraging to find this conversation sitting comfortably within an Arctic Congress. Scotland’s contribution to ScAN is often framed through the natural and ocean sciences, but rural health and workforce are also part of what binds us to our northern neighbours, and the session drew a genuinely circumpolar group into the room. I think this was the first dedicated medical education session at a UArctic Congress, and it was certainly well-attended. 

The Faroese hosts and the geography of the islands themselves gave the conference its character. There were social receptions at the national football stadium, in the town centre and a musical set from Faroese singer-songwriter Eivør. The food was interesting and enjoyable; I was please to experience sea cucumber for the first time. 

I am grateful to SMERC and to the University of St Andrews for supporting my attendance, and to the organisers for a memorable conference. The connections made with colleagues (particularly from Ireland, Canada and Norway) in Tórshavn will, I hope, shape collaborative work on rural and northern medical education for some time to come.

The article was originally published on the Scottish Arctic Network (ScAN) website. Click here for the original story. 

ScAN also operates as a UArctic Regional Centre; for more information, see ScAN's Regional Centre page.