WILDFIRE Mildura pitched in to raise awareness for Oxfam’s Close the Gap campaign to improve indigenous health during March. The week of activities began on Monday 19 March with committee members tagging the Mildura Base Hospital with Close the Gap posters and balloons. But this was only a taste of what was to come!

On Wednesday, the Year 3 students gathered to watch a DVD on the Close the Gap campaign. Then the production line got underway making pins to be distributed on Close the Gap Day (Thursday), closely overlooked by Kavya and Emma who had given up their Sunday to engineer the badge design.

Mildura-based medical students created and staffed a display about Indigenous health in the hospital foyer.

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Mildura Year 3 student, Travis Taggert, was recently asked by a local school teacher if he could run a couple of workshops for some grade 5/6 school children at St Paul’s Primary School in Mildura, an invitation he gladly accepted.

At the time the classes had just started a new unit of work about the human body and how to best keep themselves fit and healthy. Travis determined that the foundation of any first aid situation, learning DRSABCD, would be a good start for the students and also fun and interesting to learn.

Step by step, the children were taught how to recognise an emergency situation, were directed through each phase of the action plan and were given the opportunity to put these skills into practice in a simulated situation. These steps are the major considerations for anyone involved in the care and treatment of people in a first aid situation.

Throughout the workshop, the students were given the opportunity to build from their prior knowledge and extend their understanding of each stage through a combination of theoretical and practical experiences. Travis observed that it was great to see the students have so much fun with what they were learning, and hewas able to see them put their newly acquired skills into practice.

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

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Daryl Pedler leaves after nearly 10 years as director of Gippsland Regional Clinical School to take up the position of inaugural Professor of Rural General Practice for Deakin University, based in Warrnambool.

Thanks and farewell from Daryl Pedler Gippsland Director, Associate Professor Daryl Pedler, effectively completes his stint with the Gippsland Regional Clinical School this week (April 5) after taking up an opportunity to move back to south west Victoria. Daryl officially finishes in June but will take leave from Easter before starting his new role as the inaugural Professor of Rural General Practice for Deakin University, based in Warrnambool.

The launch of the School of Rural Health’s 20th anniversary celebrations gave Daryl the opportunity to reflect on his time with the School, which he joined in 2003. He told the group that when he joined the Gippsland Regional Clinical School he had a strong interest in population health and an equally strong conviction about the suitability of rural training for the MBBS. The program was in its infancy when Daryl started in Gippsland. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Bendigo primary school students have had their fears and anxieties about going to the doctor diminished thanks to medical students and a collective of teddy bears!

Medical students from Monash and Melbourne Universities took part in a Teddy Bear Hospital for children at Camp Hill Primary School. The grade one and two students took part in several workshops, which aimed to educate the children as well as reduce the anxiety and nervousness that goes with going to the doctor or the hospital.

Monash Year 4 students Shelene and Charles perform "surgery" on a teddy with the assistance of Camp Hill primary school students.

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The first 20 years of training models designed to boost rural health workforces – now recognised nationally and internationally – is being celebrated this year and was officially launched at a ceremony in the Latrobe Valley on Sunday 18 March.

The Monash University School of Rural Health started life as the Centre for Rural Health in a small office in the former Moe Hospital in 1992, but has grown to being an important component of the Monash University medical faculty.  The School of Rural Health delivers training for Monash University medical, nursing and allied health students in a rural setting.

The launch at the Gippsland Regional Clinical School campus in Traralgon, adjacent to Latrobe Regional Hospital, signalled the start of numerous activities.

Professor Judi Walker at the launch, with Associate Professor Daryl Pedler and Professor Roger Strasser joining from Canada via Skype.

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Jessica Dean shaved the dreads she loved for the World's Greatest Shave

A Bendigo-based medical student shaved off her waist-length blonde dreadlocks to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation as part of the World’s Greatest Shave.

Jessica adopted dreadlocks while living in the arid desert in the south of Israel four years ago where she spent six months as a volunteer paramedic. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Around 1000 people attended the Mildura Aboriginal Health Services Health and Wellbeing Community Day featuring guest star Jessica Mauboy.

The event was held from 10am until 10pm on Saturday 25 February to create awareness of sexual health problems, and aiming to break the Guinness World Record for the most sexual health screenings in 12 hours. Several of the medical students currently in Mildura assisted on the day, recruited by local Harvest Alliance School of Indigenous Health lecturer, Rose Gilby.