Gippsland Medical School students recently completed their placement at Latrobe Community Health Service (LCHS) as part of a cross organisational experience designed to give them an insight into the range of services provided.

The Community Health Service hosted the 10 students this year, five in semester one and five in semester two. They attended various programs such as Creative House, District Nursing, Primary Intervention, Assessment, Aged and Disability Services and Drug Treatment Services.

The placements culminated in an evaluation day which, among the various formalities and perhaps as a sign of the success of the program, included an afternoon tea with a spread of home baked cakes direct from the kitchen of Student Placement Officer with LCHS Sue Townsend.

More formally, Gippsland Medical School’s Dr Margaret Simmons, CBP Academic Coordinator and Susan Smith, CBP Agency Liaison, attended to discuss the placements and confirm that the current program was meeting all student goals and objectives.

LCHS supervising staff Jane Taylor, Interprofessional Educator, along with Sue Townsend attended to give the students an opportunity to provide feedback on their thoughts and experiences during their placement and to finalise paperwork.

The student evaluations were all positive and the general consensus was that the current rotation was working really well. Some student comments were, “Keep the rotations, they worked fantastically”, “I had an excellent time and gained an appreciation of all the important services available in the community” and “learnt lots about the importance of ‘whole patient’ care and integrated care.”

Latrobe Community Health Service is looking forward to hosting the next cohort of Gippsland Medical School students in 2013.

Gippsland Regional Clinical School Deputy Director, Dr Cathy Haigh, travelled to New Zealand in June to present at the ANZAHPE (Australia and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators) annual conference in Rotorua.

This year is the 40th conference of the organisation which aims to promote, support and advance education in the health professions while also facilitating communication between educators.

Cathy presented on the topic ‘Learning in the Clinical Workplace: A Qualitative Analysis of Reflections of Final Year Medical Students’ as part of the Learning in the Workplace session and also presented an e-poster, which described the simulated disaster multi-agency training opportunity afforded to Year 4C students in Gippsland recently.

Associate Professor William Hart from Gippsland Medical School was another School of Rural Health representative at the conference, presenting on two topics. One was titled: ‘Final Year Medical Students’ Perceptions of Feedback to Support Learning: A Qualitative Study’ and the other: ‘Is Good Medical Practice Predictable From Student Selection Measures?’

As part of the Gippsland Medical School’s Disability Module for Health and Society, Guide Dogs Victoria recently visited and provided a suite of activities for students give them a deeper understanding of what it is like to live with a disability.

The session enabled students to get a sense of how the Gippsland campus particularly, and our environment in general, caters for people with a vision impairment or other disability and also the kinds of services that Guide Dogs Victoria offers, which are not only for the vision impaired.

Importantly, the students got to meet Benson the guide dog, and learn how to interact with a working guide dog and to see what he is like when out of his harness. His owner Joan described him as “a real hoon!”

The students really enjoyed this activity again, as they did last year. Guide Dogs Victoria is always keen to promote its work, so was pleased to return this year to help with Gippsland Medical School’s educational activities.

Gippsland Medical School lecturer Tracy Morrison has had an abstract of her PhD ‘Faculty development, leadership and organisational culture – a case study’ accepted for a presentation at the Case Studies Methodologies conference in Orlando in July 2012.

It will be a busy couple of months for Tracy and also Professor Debra Nestel, who have had two abstracts accepted at the ANZAHPE meeting in New Zealand for PEMER (program of excellence in medical education research) and MERGE (Enabling multi-level learners in general practice).
Tracy will be presenting these at the conference in late June.

Debra has also been invited to serve as one of four Symposium Co-chairs for the upcoming Society in Healthcare Faculty Development Symposium, being held on 25 and 26 January 2013 in Orlando, Florida on the eve of the 13th International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare.

Gippsland Medical School has been a strong response to invitations to apply for graduate entry medicine.  So far 3,500 on-line applications  have been received via GEMSAS – and this number is expected to increase dramatically over the next few days.

The number of applications from rural and, more importantly Gippsland has also increased.  Gippsland Medical School is also receiving its first applications from the Gippsland Biomedical Science students who are now in their third and final year.

The reliability and consistency of OSCEs, and using simulation to enhance interprofessional learning were among topics examined by GMS presenters at the recent Ottawa Conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Professor Debra Nestel conducted two workshops. In conjunction with Dr Cathy Smith and Dr Carol O’Byrne from the University of Toronto and the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada. “Training standardized patients for high stakes examinations: strategies and tools to achieve ‘exam readiness‘”. Standardization of Simulated/Standardized Patient performance in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) is vital to the defensibility of the examination. However, little is written on how to achieve this goal. The workshop shared approaches from Austaralia, Canada and the USA.

Professor Debra Nestel (far right) with Leone English (Holmesglen TAFE), Professor Brian Jolly (Monash) and Debra Kiegaldie (Southern Health) at the Ottawa Conference in Kuala Lumpur

(more…)

Registrations are now open for this year’s Gippsland Medical School Information Session, scheduled for Saturday 28 April, at 9:30am in the Gippsland Campus Auditorium (see the campus map here).

Potential applicants who want to learn more about the graduate program need to register first on the GMS web site.

Professor Debra Nestel of the Gippsland Medical School is leading the national training program which aims to increase clinical training capacity for Australian health professionals.

The Australian Simulation Educators and Technician Trainers (AusSETT) is funded by Health Workforce Australia and aims to deliver standardised, national training to help increase clinical training capacity  through additional and better trained simulation educators and technicians.

Adopting the ‘train the trainer’ model, the workshop prepares participants to teach simulation based education to other educators in their region.

The first cohort of educators attended a two-day program at Holmesglen Institute in December 2011, and in February 2012 the second cohort completed the program. Participants were selected from across the state and across disciplines. Later this month, the program moves to Townsville and then across the country until June.

GMS student, Sam Alexander, with the three horses he will ride up the east coast of Australia.

Gippsland Medical School Year B student Sam Alexander has put his studies on hold this year while he takes off on what can only be described as a great adventure – riding his three horses 5,330 kilometres along the east coast of Australia.

It is not just a whim for Sam, however, as he is undertaking the journey to raise awareness for a cause close to his heart, the importance of medical care in rural Australia, while also raising money for the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service.

Sam left late in February and just before heading off dropped into the Gippsland Medical School with his three steeds for a meet and greet with GMS staff and Year A students, enabling everyone to wish him well on his endeavour.

If you would like to assist or want more details about Sam’s quest, see  www.headingnorth2012.com.

The Gippsland Medical School welcomed 90 Year A students as the 2012 cohort, all starting on Monday 23 January.

The first day included a ‘Welcome to Country’ by Mr. Wayne Thorpe, then Gippsland Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Helen Bartlett and Professor Judi Walker, Head School of Rural Health, along with Associate Professor William Hart, Director Gippsland Medical School, each addressed the students.

The next day the students attended an awards presentation for the highest achieving students from the 2011 Year A cohort. First Prize in Academic Excellence for the Highest Achiever in Year A 2011 was awarded to Elizabeth Duffett, while Matthew Brain and Frances Harkin also received awards for high achievement in Year A 2011.

For the 2012 students, last Wednesday (25 January) included an ‘Inspirational Speakers’ session given by Professor Ed Byrne and Dr Ranjana Srivistava to help inspire them for their first year of medical studies.