by Nida Hafiz
WATCCH (Widening Access To Community Careers in Healthcare), run by the Undergraduate Primary Care Education Team at Imperial College is now in its fourth year of running. The programme aims to support Year 13 students from widening participation backgrounds to pursue a career in healthcare, providing information on a range of careers and guiding them through admissions processes. Mentors, recruited by Vision Society, facilitate the small group sessions within workshops and were first introduced to the scheme last year.
I was delighted to be accepted as a mentor last year, and this year am honoured to be student lead. I decided to apply to become a WATCCH mentor for many reasons. Knowing how difficult and stressful the university application process can be even with support around, I wanted to help provide guidance for those students who do not have access support elsewhere. As someone who would once shy away from mentoring, I really wanted to work on my interpersonal skills and confidence and felt that WATCCH was a great opportunity to do that whilst making a difference. In the past I have volunteered at one-day university application workshops but what drew me to WATCCH was its longitudinal approach, meeting with the same students at each workshop, allowing rapport to be built and maintained, creating a familiar environment for students to seek the guidance they would like.
The workshops are typically held monthly, this year online, covering different aspects of the application process. Following the central delivery of the main content, mentors work with students in breakout rooms on the topic pertaining to the workshop. For example, in the opening workshop in August, mentors and students discussed different healthcare professions’ roles and learnt about each student, their career goals and challenges they anticipated facing this year. September’s workshop was on personal statement writing, and students were able to have their personal statements reviewed in small groups. There is also now the online Brightside platform, new to WATCCH, meaning that mentoring can continue safely outside of the workshops.
Being a WATCCH mentor provides constant opportunities to build on mentoring and communication skills alike. During the training session, Dr Arti Maini ran through key skills for mentoring and coaching, including the GROW model, a personal favourite which involves asking a series of questions to help one think about a difficult situation more objectively. I have learnt what it is to mentor and guide someone rather than handing them the answer, something I have mistakenly done in the past but have been able to work on during the mentoring sessions. I have also learnt to become more adaptable and comfortable not knowing the answer to every question and to take on that mentoring approach and find ways to enable students to reach a solution themselves. These skills, whilst useful as part of WATCCH, could also provide a good foundation to build on later as doctors teaching medical students or doctors mentoring junior colleagues.
Mentoring with WATCCH has made me more appreciative of inequities that exist in accessing places at university and obstacles students can face when applying. To help better support students applying for non-medicine courses we have built up information resources for a range of different healthcare courses for mentors and students to access and we hope this can be carried forwards for years to come. It is incredibly rewarding to be able to help provide the WATCCH students with support to help them achieve their potential and get into their desired healthcare course.