How do contextual issues influence social accountability in medical education?

Flinders University and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine are very pleased to partner again in delivering this conference, Muster 2014 at Uluru. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land and the Elders past, present, and future. Thank you for welcoming us to your lands. Thank you for starting our journey by performing the Inma, a very significant cultural ceremony. With the theme of Aboriginal Health as a key component of this conference, we are delighted to be holding Muster 2014 in a resort owned by an Indigenous organization intent on doing exactly what we want to do in medical education, but in hostelry and tourism, so that we will have many opportunities to learn as we go about the conference, in and out of the sessions. I am particularly excited by the generous offer of the Ngangkaris to be with us throughout the conference, the opportunity to visit the Training College on Wednesday, and the Purple Truck (mobile dialysis unit) on Thursday. We have over 200 people attending Muster 2014 which is fourth in the series of conferences on Global Community Engaged Medical Education, and the second Muster held here in Australia. For those of you who attended the first Muster in the Barossa—welcome back! And for those of you who have attended ICEMEN or Rendez- Vous 2012 in Canada—welcome to the heart of Australia, here in Uluru. For those who are new to these conferences and new to the underpinning concepts of community engagement, longitudinal learning and socially accountable medical education— this is a very important conference that will be the start of an exciting learning journey for you, just as it is a continuing learning journey for the rest of us. Don’t be afraid to join in and have your say! We intend to try and map your learning journeys in the report of the conference, so we invite you to have your say in many ways—blogs, twitter, quotes, evaluation, photos, maps (geographic and learning) etc—and put them all in to a portfolio style to record the memories. Please help us do this so that it will be meaningful to you. It always has struck me that we could further maximize the expertise at a conference and so this year we have a new feature: Deans Unplugged! Sadly, Eric Clapton isn’t with us but I am sure the Deans will step up and try to be as heartfelt. This is an opportunity where, unfettered by a desk and piles of paperwork, you will find a number of Deans at the poolside, willing and able to discuss any issue you might want to raise with them. This is an occasion where you ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission. As the conference program grew, I kept wanting to clone myself to be able to attend everything. I hope you will find it easier to decide what to attend! A big thank you to all of the reviewers and the Organising and Scientific Committees. We have tried to make the program easy to follow with a program outline at a glance; a small booklet with the program abstract titles; and the full program and full abstracts on the website which you can access by scanning the QR code, or via the USB provided. We have kept the coloured themes from the previous conferences, however many presentations cover more than one theme, so check all the abstracts for a list of themes covered. Key features are the plenary sessions (blue) which I hope you will all be able to drag yourselves away from the outdoors to attend. Over the three days, we traverse from ideas to theory then putting it into practice with a final session in the last afternoon on the future. We have been able to engage great partners who have helped us to keep the program on track: The Consortium for Longitudinal Integrated Curricula (CLIC), The Federation of Rural Australian Medical Educators (FRAME), James Cook University (JCU), and The Training for Health Equity Network (THEnet). We are very grateful to our sponsors for their support to ensure that the conference happens this year against a climate of so many cutbacks. A huge thank you to the Muster admin team: Lila, Eliza, Monica, Sylvie, Kim, and Kiri who have held this all together over the last eighteen months and managed to work across the world effectively without borders! I recommend Muster 2014 to you and look forward to receiving your comments during and after the conference.