Abstract
Medical education involves understanding the basic sciences and clinical knowledge. Both components are equally important. Although most of the healthcare professional schools use integrated teaching curriculum, students have difficulty trying to link the basic science to the clinical knowledge especially when the courses are taught a few years ago. In addition, professional medical terminology are heavily used that may be difficult for patients to understand. It is important for clinicians to ensure proper and understandable information is given to their patients for better disease management. The design of the current project is to fill the knowledge gap and to provide easy understanding of how one disease is managed from the beginning of understanding of the organ (anatomy and physiology), how the drugs work on body (pharmacology) to clinical management of disease (clinical application and therapeutics) and vice versa. The project also aims to develop the translational inter-professional e-learning platform focusing on geriatric medicine and elderly care in the community particularly utilization of knowledge and enhancement of medical language skills. This e-learning teaching platform will utilize computer simulations and teaching videos to simulate the real-world clinical scenarios. Students can also apply their knowledge in the real geriatric setting via the local and international community elderly outreach programs.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
This project aimed at filling the knowledge gap and providing easy understanding of disease and drugs management. The project also aimed to develop a translational inter-professional eLearning platform focusing on geriatric care in the community, particularly the utilization of knowledge and enhancement of medical language skills. Students could apply their knowledge in the real geriatric setting via the community elderly outreach programmes.
Activities, process and outcomes
As a team comprised of teachers of various disciplines from Faculty of Medicine and Department of Social Work, we successfully developed an inter-professional eLearning platform, training workshops, and service learning programme to enhance students’ medical language usage and health knowledge delivering skills with real patient in the community. The project attracted 467 student volunteers, conducted 85 sessions of outreach services, and reached 4919 older adults in the community within the 22 months project period.
Deliverables and evaluation
Utilization rate and student feedback survey were used to evaluate students’ medical language usage, health knowledge, and the usefulness of the inter-professional eLearning platform. Attitude change, improvement of language skills and satisfaction of students were also collected. We detected significant improvement on students’ health knowledge, and their medical language skills.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
We presented our project at our annual wrap up presentation in October 2017 and 2018, CLEAR Expo at CUHK in December 2017 and 2018, CUHK Faculty of Medicine’s Medical Education Conference in March 2018, HKU’s medical education conference in December 2018, and an international medical education conference in Switzerland in August 2018. For more information of our project please visit www.cuchampion.com.
