Development of a wilderness and travel medicine rotation in an academic setting.

Wilderness medicine courses tend to teach similar topics, but they can differ with respect to philosophy, teaching methods, and financing. Our not-for-profit course is academically based and is similar to other programs with regard to presentations of didactic material and outdoor training, but there are also important differences in teaching methodology that are not used by other programs to date. Innovative methods, such as problem-based learning and use of the human patient simulator, which are unique to our program, have been successful in our courses and may be of use to wilderness medical education. We hope that sharing information about our program will help make wilderness medicine training more standardized and uniform.