Associate Professor Fiona Wright from the Mildura Regional Clinical School and Laura Major from the School of Rural Health Rural Education Program office headed to Malaysia in May to assist with implementing the Monash Malaysia Year 2 MBBS Integrated Rural Program (MIRP) pilot study.

The pilot was undertaken in Segamat, a rural town and district which is located about 172 km from Johor Bahru.

Year 2 student volunteers undertook the pilot under the watchful eye of Professor Shah Yasin, his team from Monash Sunway in Kuala Lumpur (KL) and colleagues from the Johor Bahru Clinical School.  Students had the opportunity to undertake daily ward rounds at the 320 bed Segamat Hospital, which serves patients from a large area, some as far as Gemas and Rompin about 45 minutes to an hour away.

Students also enjoyed the opportunity of attending daily clinical placements at district community clinics that deal with a range of health issues, as well as attending regular placements at much smaller village clinics which deal primarily with maternal and child health issues.  In addition, students undertook PBL tutorials as well as clinical skills sessions within a rural context. This was to ensure that they kept up with their central curriculum learning activities.

The regular recording of lectures at Sunway campus in KL allowed the student pilot cohort to download these each day in Segamat and view them during timetabled self-directed learning sessions or in their own time.

Fiona and Laura moderated an evaluation feedback session on the last day of the pilot.

The universal consensus among the students was that they felt the new rural program, focussing on the introduction of clinical skills to Year 2 students in a rural context and experience of rural health service systems rather than a focus on the Sunway curriculum, would enable them to feel better prepared to commence their Year 3 clinical studies.

More importantly the students stated that they felt this model would lessen the “transition shock” that many MBBS students experience as they move from pre-clinical to clinical years training.

The Malaysian Year 2 MIRP pilot student group on the last day of the study.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Learning and teaching, Public. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.