Rural round up: The development of the Rural Family Medicine Café

Mayara Floss is a keynote speaker at the WONCA World Rural health conference coming to Cairns, Australia from 29 April- 2 May 2017. She created the Rural Family Medicine Café to provide a forum to discuss Rural Health and has now written a "how to" manual so others can expand on the Rural Café movement

As of this January, the project Rural Family Medicine Café has completed 16 “Café” activities.

At the most recent “café” there was great participation in discussing “Rural Research”. Noni MacDonald, Joy Mugambi, David Hogg, Bianca Silveira and myself were present on the videoconference. We had interesting inputs from Facebook and from twitter with the hashtag #ruralcafe – we discussed the issues of outcomes and challenges of rural research, including cultural competence in research, micro research, "research for who?" Please watch the “café” by clicking on the screen clip which shows Noni MacDonald sharing her experience in microresearch in Africa, having been invited to participate by Joy Mugambi.

Amber Wheatley, one of the coordinators of the project is organising some research about the project for us in order to measure the impact of more than one year of “café” activities.

Finally, I am really happy to share with you a manual that I have written about “How to do a Rural Café”. In this manual we have 15 steps teaching you how to organise and facilitate a Rural Café. The idea is to improve the access to these discussions and technology , thereby hopefully increasing local Rural Cafés in local languages and discussing local community issues in rural health.

How to do a Rural Café - the manual

I hope you enjoy it!
Best,
Mayara Floss

Follow the next Rural Cafe about the Rural Medical Education Guidebook,
More information .
Like the Rural Cafe page on

Who is Mayara?

Mayara Floss is a keynote speaker at the WONCA World Rural health conference coming to Cairns, Australia from 29 April- 2 May 2017.

Mayara Floss is an undergraduate student of medicine at Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) in Brazil. She is the co-creator of project 'Health Education League' based on the Freirean principles and co-empowerment of communities and students.

In 2015 she created the Rural Family Medicine Café to provide a forum to discuss Rural Health – a forum for students, young doctors and experienced professors and GPs from all world. She is the student representative of the WONCA Working Party on Rural Practice. She also co-created with Pratyush Kumar the project 'Rural Health Success Stories' and writes a weekly blog of Popular Education, Arts and Health - the Ferry Street of 10.