Adults with disabilities tutor medical students
A group of people with intellectual disabilities played a big role in educating Gippsland-based medical students at a special forum in April.
Students, education leaders and clinical educators travelled to Monash University’s Gippsland Campus for the group workshop. Medical students from East Gippsland Regional Clinical School sites in Sale and Bairnsdale, along with Gippsland Regional Clinical School students from the Latrobe Valley, South Gippsland and West Gippsland took part in the joint education session with eight people from Cooinda Hill Adult Training Support Service, a day service for adults with a disability.
The group of people from the Cooinda Hill Adult Training Support Service who helped out at a Gippsland-wide education day.
The Cooinda Hill participants became the ‘tutors’ for the day in an exercise that helped the medical students learn about communication.
The 44 medical students divided into groups, with each group meeting with a Cooinda ‘tutor.’ The students asked those from Cooinda for information about themselves – where they live, what they like doing, what team they barrack for, what they like doing with their friends and what they do at work. After the initial chat, the medical students were asked to explain a medical condition to the ‘tutor’– anything from the common cold, to dandruff or back pain. The students had to work out how best to communicate using plain English and without jargon.
Dr Jane Tracy, Education Director at the Monash University Centre for Developmental Disability Health, who facilitated the workshop, said the purpose of the workshop was to assist the medical students with their understanding of the difficulties people with disabilities sometimes face when visiting a doctor, such as not being spoken to directly or using words that are difficult to understand. The Cooinda ‘tutors’ helped by telling the students when they didn’t understand.
The most valuable part of these sessions is the direct contact between the ‘tutors’ and the students and the ways they found to improve their communication to patients with disabilities.
Once that activity was completed, the whole group came together and those from Cooinda Hill spoke about their own experiences of doctors or hospitals. They also provided some thoughts on what skills the medical students should learn to improve their approach to those who have disabilities.
The event was organised and coordinated by East Gippsland Regional Clinical School Clinical Educator Marnie Connolly for all of the medical students in the School of Rural Health South East region.