H.E.A.R.T. (Healthcare, Education and Research Talks) – Romania (FASMR)

Name of the activity: H.E.A.R.T. (Healthcare, Education and Research Talks)

Country/NMO: Romania (FASMR)

Program: Teaching Medical Skills

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education

General description:

H.E.A.R.T. is a 2-day long interdisciplinary conference already at its 5-th
edition, consisting not only of lectures, but also trainings, workshops and
round-table discussions. Furthermore, we are already growing as a
community of enthusiastic students that share ideas and work together,
by creating smaller events that are to be taking place all year-round.

Focus area:

Doctor-Patient communication skills, Soft Skills for medical practitioners, Research basics for medical practitioners

Problem statement:

Medical students in Romania are not being encouraged to take
initiative, value personal development opportunities, or work in teams
to build solutions for the problems they encounter in our healthcare
system. This is due to low government funding for research and
education, high bureaucracy and an educational system focusing on
rote learning.

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Medical students

Objectives and indicators of success:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13Bk9-36DXcPHjEku1srV0avmCaiYA7Hk

Methodology:

Every year, we give students in our organization the opportunity to become HEART volunteers. First, we hold small group discussions about our aims and general guidelines, after which each volunteer chooses the field he/she wants to work in and we start the department meetings and the actual designing of the conference and side-projects. The H.E.A.R.T. conference will cover 2 full days, as following:
– First day: opening ceremony; 5-6 morning lectures separated by a coffee
break and a lunch break; a social event – the gala.
– Second day: 4-5 morning lectures separated by a coffee break; closing ceremony; 7-8 evening simultaneous extra sessions (e.g. workshops, training sessions, round table discussions).
We also organize the H.E.A.R.T. evenings, where we invite our mentors to discuss on certain topics. These events are meant to be seen as a sustainable source of inspiration, but also as a mean to continuously pinpoint the most stringent issues we face in our education, acknowledge them and create solutions.

Furthermore, participants have the opportunity to be speakers as well, through the Pecha Kucha presentation. PechaKucha is a presentation style which was introduced to the HEART conference during the 4th edition, in 2017. Each presentation consists of 20 slides (1 image/slide) which are shown for 20 seconds each. Each presentation has to be in English. 20 x 20 = a 6 minutes and 40 seconds long presentation. The talks should emphasize personal experiences of the speakers, with ups and downs. The most innovative/meaningful/impressive presentations will be selected for an interview which will consist of presenting the applicants’ work in front of the selecting team (HEART organizers). The best 6 performances (2 for each topic) will be selected for coaching sessions before being presented at the conference.

Accepted presenters will be granted an active participant diploma, as well as free attendance of the conference!

Plans for evaluation:

Our way of changing the mentality of our fellow students and reforming our medical education is to actually create a community consisting of the people who are willing to make a change and inspiring them to do so. This begins from our volunteers, all directly involved in building our agenda. We measure the short-term impact that the conference has on the 400 participants through feedback forms, from which we have statistically identified a significant
motivational increase, willingness to work on personal development,
self-consciousness. Our long-term aim, being the sustainability of these changes, is achieved by investing in people to take our work further and our success is measured by their initiative and involvement. So far, several ideas that have been born in our HEART community, concentrated on improving our medical education, public health and innovative capacity, turned into reality (the Doctors’ Caravan of Cluj county, an Orchestra of medical students) and others
like a Healthcare Hackathon are being developed.