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Beyond the ward: Students organise worldwide conference on future of medical education

17 June 2020

A group of students have come together to organise an online conference on medical education for over 2,000 people.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a significant amount of free online medical resources for students all over the world. However, final year medical student, Pedra Rabiee, noticed that some of these resources did not suit her learning methods. She approached the Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA) to discuss medical education during COVID-19, both in terms of current lessons learnt and the future of teaching.

Initially, I intended for this conference to be just for medical students, but after formulating a team, we came to the realisation that the entire healthcare field had experienced changes to the delivery of education and training. So, if everyone, including students, trainees and educators, had been struggling these past months, why not expand the target audience?– Pedra Rabiee

Pedra wanted to create an event where people could be provided with an insight into the future of medical education and share and understand what innovative projects are out there. Among the list of speakers was Professor Tim Lancaster and Dr Sam Thenabadu – Dean and Deputy Dean of Medical Education at King’s.

Organisers expected around 300 people, but there was interest from across the world, with over 2,000 people attending the meeting.

This demonstrates the huge appetite there was for such an event. Additionally, we received a high amount of varied virtual posters and presentations from across the world on what people are doing in medical education during COVID-19.– Pedra Rabiee

The topics covered included Restoration, Recovery and Resuming Careers, The Revolution of Social Media Medicine, Welcome to the New Normal, and many more.

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Pedra says that she would not have been able to make this happen alone, and it was thanks to the wonderfully efficient team that this worked so well. The team was made up of scholars at the HLA (mostly medical students), technical and operational experts from the Medics Academy and academics from the Association for the Study of Medical Education, Trainees in the Association for the Study of Medical Education and Junior Association for the Study of Medical Education. Professor Derek Gallen co-chaired the conference.

It still shocks me that it ran very smoothly, considering the short amount of time to pull the event together. This is a credit to the immense teamwork and support we had from our partners, and all who contributed.– Pedra Rabiee

You can watch the conference here.