Imperial College London Primary Care

This summer the Department of Primary Care and Public Health kicked off an exciting new programme to Widening Access to Careers in Community Healthcare (WATCCH). We hosted twenty 17 year olds – aspiring to be the first in their families to go to university – at the Charing Cross campus for the inaugural WATCCH project. Our aim was to change perceptions of wider healthcare careers and provide vital work experience for their University application forms. Competition was high and the team was very impressed by the number of high calibre students that applied for a place. The pupils, in pairs, then attended a 3-day work experience attachment at a General Practice over the summer, where they shadowed various health care professionals ranging from pharmacists, to  phlebotomists, nurses, physiotherapists and GPs.  Our budding health professionals reported that they had their eyes opened to new and different  careers in healthcare they were not previously aware of. One pu...

AAME, Helsinki.   Jenna Mollaney, Primary Care Education Manager After tackling the overwhelming brochure of talks and workshops at AMEE (Association of Medical Education Europe) 2017, I settled upon a stream entitled ‘Social Accountability’. We were a small group of no more than 20 people and after the presentations, I felt sad that more people hadn’t been able to hear about the amazing work that is going on about SA (Social Accountability) in Medical Schools across the world. Hopefully this article will do a little bit to help get Educators thinking about their part in it. First of all, what is Social Accountability? I found this video created by the International Federation of Medical Students Associations extremely enlightening: http://ifmsa.org/social-accountability/ It made me wonder, what are we at Imperial College doing to help support the idealistic vision of what a Medical School should look like? We want to create not only competent Doctors; but, Doctors ...

Student-Patient Partnerships One of the most memorable medical education initiatives that I took home from the AMEE (Association of Medical Education Europe) conference this year was the importance of the patient role in teaching medical students. I attended two talks which outlined formal patient/teaching partnerships and was impressed that such formal groups have been brought together to participate in student teaching on a regular and structured basis across different specialties in the undergraduate degree programme. Most notable were two initiatives, the first run by the University of Sheffield, Patients as Educators Programme https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/aume/pae_dept   where an established (large) group of patients act as regular educators across the degree course, concentrating on the teaching of history taking, physical examination and clinical assessment.   Equally impressive was the University of British Columbia’s ‘Patient and Community Partnership for Ed...

The team enjoyed hosting a stand at this annual event to allow the public to engage in the scientific activities of Imperial.   We had an anatomy theme. Anatomuddle: We put three different bones into a black bag and using touch only, people   guessed which bones they were and then how they fitted together to form a joint.   Children loved watching Mum and Dad struggle! Anatomap: There was a chance to work out where different organs in Beautiful Benita the mannequin fitted and then find out what the names for diseases of the different organs were Anatomould: the younger children attempted to make moulds of organs using playdough (and seemed to be wearing a 'I love my GP badge!') A fun day was had by all.

The Annual Teachers’ Conference took place on Friday 9 June 2017 Celebrating the Student and Teacher Partnership.   The keynote speaker, Professor Val Wass , highlighted four important areas we need to recognise and address as teachers to support students to flourish as clinicians in their future. Do not confine students to your own learning for they are born for another time (Hebrews Proverb) Generation Gap : Teachers have a responsibility to prepare students to be able to flourish in the change and uncertainty ahead e.g. with limited resources, changing health system, possible fall of Western dominance in the world  Societal Borders: Here the barriers are not so much knowledge and skills but achieving shared values such as human rights, dignity, equity.   ‘The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another’ (Proust)...