Learning through Art in Medical Education

Medical Humanities approach is becoming an important action in the health curriculum. Art can play a central role in the training of care staff for the development of skills and for the humanization of the therapeutic path. The application of art as a tool for learning and its historical relationship with medicine can be a valid support for the development of skills such as observation, active listening, problem solving and empathy, useful for improving the profession and the relationship with the patient. It is possible to rediscover the link between art, medicine, and care to help health professionals to improve their activities and resilience. Particular methods such as that of the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) can help health students and professionals to become better actors in the care context.

A comparative study of community medicine and public health curriculum at medical schools in Iran and North America

Background: Community medicine and public health are the core subjects in medical education. One of the main competencies of general physicians in the national curriculum is having knowledge and skills in health promotion and disease prevention in the health system. Any curriculum revision in community medicine departments needs to incorporate the evidence and use pioneer countries’ experiences in this issue. This study aims to compare community medicine and public health courses in medical schools between Iran and selected universities in North America. Methods: The elements of a community medicine curriculum for medical students were compared in a descriptive-comparative study using the Bereday model. These elements included objectives and competencies, educational strategies, teaching and learning methods, assessment, and educational fields in a community medicine curriculum in Iran and in selected universities in North America. A literature search was conducted in CINAHL, SCOPUS, MEDLINE, Web of Science, EBSCO, and on university websites. Results: Essential aspects of community-based strategies among community medicine and public health curriculum of general medicine in universities in Canada and the United States included a longitudinal approach, training in urban and rural primary care centers, teaching by family physicians and health center staff, a spiral curriculum, focus on social determinants of health, taking of social and cultural histories and social prescriptions, learning teamwork, and using LIC (Longitudinal Integrated Curriculum). Conclusion: The objective of community medicine and public health curriculum in selected North American universities was to prepare general practitioners who work in Level 2 and 3 hospitals and to improve their skills to provide high-quality services to the community. Some of the successful points in the selected universities that could be replicated in Iranian faculties of medicine included using integration strategy, a spiral curriculum, and an LIC approach.

Experiment on the Training Mode of College Students’ Physical Ability in Traditional Medical Health Sports Courses

Objectives: Sports is a highly competitive sport, and the intensity of college students in the process of capacity development is also very large, which is easy to cause physical damage. Methods: Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of medical and health curriculum model, observing the various links in the process of cultivating students’ ability. Results: Through the automatic analysis of the computer system, the changes of college students are reflected in the form of data, so as to standardize the rationality and security of the ability training of college students. Conclusion: In the test of the medical and health care model, through the comparative test experiment and the phased input test, the physical ability of college students has improved significantly, which proves that the medical and health care physical education curriculum has obvious effect.

Development of a Vertically Integrated Pharmacy Degree

Whilst curriculum revision is commonplace, whole degree transformation is less so. In this paper we discuss the rationale, design and implementation of a unique pharmacy program by a research-intensive faculty. The new Monash pharmacy curriculum, which had its first intake in 2017, was built using a range of key innovations that aimed to produce graduates that demonstrate key conceptual understanding and all the skills required to deliver world-best patient outcomes. The key elements of the re-design are outlined and include the process and principles developed, as well as key features such as a student-centred individualised program of development arranged around specific, authentic tasks for each skill and earlier enhanced experiential placements where students become proficient in entrustable professional activities. It is hoped the dissemination of this process, as well as the lessons learnt in the process, will be useful to others looking to transform a health curriculum.

How the Coronavirus Inspired Teaching the Diffusion of Innovation Theory

Many public health courses include content on behavior change theories, including the Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DoI). In DoI, innovations are adopted based on 5 characteristics: the innovation's relative advantage of what came before, its compatibility with a person or group's culture, the complexity of the innovation, whether the innovation can be tried before fully adopted, and whether or not the effects of adopting this innovation can be observed in others. This paper describes the application of the public health response to COVID-19 in the US as a dynamic example with which to teach DoI theory in the context of an undergraduate program planning and evaluation class. Because students were forced into an online environment when essential businesses closed in an effort to ‘flatten’ the coronavirus curve, we describe the unique way the outbreak could be used in an organic online discussion in which students could use their own current experiences to extrapolate to the DoI constructs. While not done as a formal "lesson plan", we describe the students' engagement, provide commentary of their application of DoI to the COVID-19 response, and suggest how more formal exercises could be incorporated into undergraduate public health curriculum.

An Undergraduate Medical Education Framework for Refugee and Migrant Health: Curriculum Development and Conceptual Approaches

Background: International migration, especially forced migration, highlights important medical training needs including cross-cultural communication, human rights, as well as global health competencies for physical and mental healthcare. This paper responds to the call for a ‘trauma informed’ refugee health curriculum framework from medical students and global health faculty. Methods: We used a mixed-methods approach to develop a guiding medical undergraduate refugee and migrant health curriculum framework. We conducted a scoping review, key informant faculty interviews and e-surveys, and then, integrated our results into a competency-based curriculum framework with values and principles, learning objectives and curriculum delivery methods and evaluation. Results: The majority of our Canadian medical faculty respondents reported some refugee health learning objectives within their undergraduate medical curriculum. The most prevalent learning objective topics included access to care barriers, social determinants of health for refugees, cross-cultural communication skills, global health epidemiology, challenges and pitfalls of providing care and mental health. We report competency-based learning objectives and primary and secondary topics. We also discuss curriculum delivery and evaluation methods such as community service learning with reflection exercises. Conclusions: This guiding undergraduate medical education curriculum suggests integrating cross-cultural communication skills, exploration of access to care barriers for newcomers, and system approaches to improve refugee and migrant healthcare. Programs should also consider social determinants of health, community service learning and the development of links to community resettlement and refugee organizations.