{"id":218,"date":"2020-06-26T10:40:58","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T10:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/gp-teaching\/?p=218"},"modified":"2020-07-09T10:41:47","modified_gmt":"2020-07-09T10:41:47","slug":"medical-students-and-community-leaders-work-together-to-make-a-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/gp-teaching\/2020\/06\/26\/medical-students-and-community-leaders-work-together-to-make-a-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Medical students and community leaders work together to make a difference"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Murray MacKay and Bethany Golding<\/strong><\/p>\n

Third-year medical students partnered with community, voluntary, health & social care leaders to respond to local needs in the era of COVID-19<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty-five third-year medical students volunteered to take part in the normally compulsory part of their degree. All have worked with their partner organisations remotely via video-conferencing. Faculty connected early on with healthcare commissioners and community leaders to identify needs and assets, meaning that our students were well-placed to get involved and bring innovative ideas to important initiatives.<\/p>\n

Dr Nina Dutta said: \u201cMedical students across the world have been able to come together and work with community leaders to address pressing local needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seven different projects were ongoing over a period of ten weeks, and range from partners as varied as\u00a0Queens Park Rangers (QPR) in the Community Trust to local community groups and voluntary organisations such as the Community Champions, Sobus, Healthy W12, the BME Health Forum and Healthwatch CWL.<\/p>\n

Students taking part in the project also had the opportunity to discuss their plans with\u00a0international thought leaders, and\u00a0West London Health Partnership<\/a>\u00a0has funded some of the promising projects.<\/p>\n

Nafsika Thalassis, the Director of the BME Health Forum, reflected: \u201cThe best thing about it was how you found out what was important to the community leaders. As a result, we were doing a project that we thought genuinely mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Student Shaper Ray Wang added: \u201cWhat I think makes this type of work more meaningful for the local people and the people involved, is to have a problem and then have some sort of open-ended discussion around how do you go about solving that problem in a way that works for you rather than an idea that works for people that might be sitting in the office suite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Communities and medical students tackle health inequalities together<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr Nina Dutta<\/a>, course lead in the\u00a0School of the Public Health<\/a>, said: “Our students have admirably risen to the challenge of identifying and addressing the needs of the College’s local community. Although this term, currently a voluntary part of their programme, we’ve had a great response to the project. The undergraduate medicine MBBS course has had to shift to delivering education online response to the pandemic. This has posed challenges due to the inherent hands-on nature of healthcare, however the digital community action project has been a successful example of this transition. Here medical students across the world have been able to come together and work with community leader to address pressing local needs. We’re looking forward to learning lessons from this experience, and hopefully being able to see all our students and community partners in person again soon.”<\/p>\n

Presenting their projects remotely to their peers on 6 May, one student group’s ‘Community Action Project’ (CAP) has built on past work by the\u00a0Community Champions\u00a0Programme<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0QPR in the Community Trust<\/a>. The need for the project was identified by the Champions and the Trust early on, with their respective profiles, community and social media reach being key to the project\u2019s sustainability.<\/p>\n

The Addison Community Champions and representatives from QPR in the Community Trust are now preparing to create and deliver resource packs for one hundred vulnerable families living in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. The packs will provide items to support children and young people\u2019s creativity and emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, including recipe books and exercise ideas, mental health support, mood journals, arts and crafts materials, and signposting flyers designed by Imperial students.<\/p>\n

Barbara Shelton, Project Manager at\u00a0Addison Community Champions<\/a>, said: “This is my third year of being involved with Imperial community projects. The students were wonderful. Many have never set foot in a community centre before and don’t necessarily recognise what they’re there for, so that learning experience is always useful. Especially in times like these the medical profession needs to recognise that community leaders are an asset. If students can have those interactions at this early stage of their career, it will change the way they view their communities forever. For our part as community partners, one of the biggest lessons we learn from the students is how to better showcase the work we do,\u00a0and how we can tackle social inequalities together.”<\/p>\n

Another student group, working with the BME Health Forum Director and West London CCG, created accessible, captioned videos in multiple languages (English, Farsi, Sylheti, Kurdish, Somali, and Arabic) to reassure communities in North West London that NHS services continue to be safe to use during the pandemic. Targeted especially to meet the needs of BAME\u00a0communities, the videos will be shared via community leaders and social media platforms, particularly on WhatsApp and Facebook.<\/p>\n

Student Abi Mahendran said: “With A&E attendance 30% lower than in normal times,\u00a0and with 4% of Londoners not speaking English well, we knew this might be a useful project. We originally had a shortlist of languages we wanted our videos to be translated into, but we’ve found the\u00a0communities we’re\u00a0working with are even more diverse and require\u00a0additional translations. Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to put plans in place to publish even more videos.”<\/p>\n

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