Nacional Academy of Emergency medicine – AMSB Bulgaria

Name of the activity: Nacional Academy of Emergency medicine

Country/NMO: AMSB Bulgaria

Program: Medical Education Systems

Contact information: contact [email protected]  to get in touch with the Activity Coordinator

Type of the activity: Continuous Activity

Category: Education

Focus area: Students’ involvement in medical education | Evaluation and Assessment, Students’ involvement in medical education | Non-formal/informal education, Career support

Sustainable Development Goals addressed: SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 17 (Partnerships)

General description:

The Academy is an event that takes place in September. It aims to provide basic and advanced knowledge of emergency medicine for the students involved. The activities included lectures about different topics of emergency medicine, discussions for clinical cases, basic and advanced life support, treatment of severe wounds, emergencies in cardiology, neurology, OB-GYN, etc. This year our team plans to include 3 extra days during which students will work in emergency departments and ambulances.

Problem statement:

The problem that we want to address is the lack of quality education for emergency medicine in medical schools in Bulgaria. Every medical specialty was its emergency aspects and the fact that as students we don’t have a separate subject for it is unbelievable. Only during our Anaesthesiology cycle, we can see a piece of it.What is more, emergency medicine is not a specialty that is wanted by a lot of graduated students and that is why there is a shortage of specialists in that field in Bulgaria.

Target groups:

• Medical students

Beneficiaries:

• Medical students
• Doctors

Objectives:

Increasing medical students’ knowledge about emergency medicine by the end of September

find 4 tutors to present the emergencies in their profession in an interesting way (Urology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Cardiology, Neurology)

develop critical thinking in students through 2 clinical case discussion sessions

allow students to work side by side with professionals in a state of emergency for 3 working days in September for at least 5 hours a day and by that give them motivation and confidence to pursue a career in the emergency medicine fiels

making this an annual event that will happen at least once a year and targeting at least 100 medical students as participants and also writing a very detailed toolkit for the organization for the next coordinators

Indicators of Success:

we will send a pre- and post-activity feedback forms to the students (the week prior and the week after the event) and by comparing the forms we expect at least 50% increase of the general emrgency knowledge of the participants and at least 70% satisfaction  regarding their expectances for the project.

The last activity from the academy will be a competition (participants will be divided into four groups and they will be solving different cases -the first one that gives us the right answers to the questions asked, will be the winner)

 – with that we will measure how fast and correct are participants with their diagnoses and we expect at least 30% improvement in the given answers compared to those given in the first clinical cases sesssion

– meeting with the national consultant and national coordinators of emergency help in Bulgaria during which we will discuss the statistics for the number of medical professionals in Bulgaria  and here the goal will be to have an increase of at least 20 % professional to pursue a carrer in the emergency field by the end of 2024

– follow up activities with the participants during which they will teach non-medical professionals about basic emergency help (we did 2 workshops like this last year and we were able to teach around 60 people of basic life support techniques, by the end of 2023 we plan to have at least 4 more events and to teach at least 100 more people)

Methodology:

We plan for our activity to take place from 18 to 24 September and to have at least 6 working hours a day;                                                                           In our team we have a President of the organizing committee; a Vice President, a financial coordinator, different groups will be formed – registration, logistics, accommodation, program coordinators, food and social program, tech support, PR and sponsorships – the team will consinst of around 30 people;

Our main partners will be our main hospital base – University Hospital “”””Lozenets””””, Bulgarian Red Cross, National center for education and qualification in the system of emergency help, Student Council of Sofia university;

This year we will try to include 50 more participants (120 in total) – we want to have more students involved as participants and also younger colleagues for the OC.                                   The education module will include at least 4 lectures conducted by the tutors related to emergencies in Urology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Cardiology, Neurology. For the workshop all of the participants will be divided into 10 groups and they will be able to take part in 3 different workshops-for each we will use situlators for maximum reality of the situation. After that there will be a module, where all of the participants will be divided into smaller groups and they will have an intership in an emergency department for 3 days for at least 5 hours each of the days.

Plans for evaluation:

We plan to be flexible with our activities to meet the expectations of our participants. First of all, we plan to send the participants a form where they can tell us what they to see and learn on the days of the event and we will think of ways to incorporate this idea. During the event, everyone from our team will speak with the different participants and collect their feedback and proposals for change for the next day.  In the end, we will send another set of feedback forms not only to the participant but also to the lecturers and the organizing team since everybody has a different point of view and we can benefit from everyone’s ideas.

External collaborations:

– Bulgarian Red Cross – they let us use their simulators for basic and advanced life support

– Organisation ‘First three seconds – they gave us AVDs and showed our participants how they can use them efficiently