In the past TELMeD have worked in collaboration with our medical students to produce learning resources as part of their doctors as teacher (DAT) student selected component module, ranging from podcasts, video to leaflets and posters.
This year we started to work in partnership with of second year Plymouth Uni computing students.
This process began with our 4th years medical students pitching their ideas (for apps, games, website), to teams of Computing students stating what they wanted there ‘product’ to be able to do and ideas for the content layout.
Following the pitches, short ‘speed dating’ meetings took place to further explore the medical schools students ideas coupled with the computing students talking through their portfolio and skills they can provide. Both parties record who they want to work with, the groups are ‘matched’ successful applicants were advised within 1 week.
The computing students used agile development methodology and Trello to communicate with their fellow computing student colleagues and a range on communication methods for the wider group, mainly emails.
The benefits to students included
- teamwork
- communication skills
- project management skills
- inter-professional working
- working to changeable deadlines
- collaboratively with other students/faculty’s to a joint outcome (to complete a module and have work to place on portfolio)
These projects enabled the development of resources for curriculum, providing traction for innovation by increasing student satisfaction and putting ideas into practice, and building of relationships between the medical world and the computing world.
Five medical DAT projects (2013/14) were taken up by the computing students.
- a drugs app built to work in the NHS environment with limited clicks allowing for easy access to information. The app consists of a list of drugs and the conditions they treat
- a electrolyte medical reference app which needed be easy to navigate and update.
- Life as a dyslexic: Unity website showing three scenarios as a dyslexic and how to support those with dyslexia.
- Sign language reference website: a responsive website contains videos of basic medical terminology for use in the hospital to help doctors before translator arrives.
- Web app for use by palliative care patients to record pain and provide facts and information
Overall the teams worked well together however we feel a more structured contract whereby both parties agree to a predetermined number of meetings may have given the some groups more structure.
We are keen to evaluate this process when the students return from their breaks and implement a few tweaks to this process for future years, such as an upfront contract and meeting with teams to gain ‘updates’ on the progress. We will release these projects internally on our E-Resources gateway Student Authored Resources page for staff and students use, after the content has been signed off be a relevant medical professional.
To summarise, the collaboration has worked well and TELMeD are looking forward to working in partnership in the future.