by Murray MacKay and Bethany Golding
Third-year medical students partnered with community, voluntary, health & social care leaders to respond to local needs in the era of COVID-19
Twenty-five third-year medical students volunteered to take part in the normally compulsory part of their degree. All have worked with their partner organisations remotely via video-conferencing. Faculty connected early on with healthcare commissioners and community leaders to identify needs and assets, meaning that our students were well-placed to get involved and bring innovative ideas to important initiatives.
Dr Nina Dutta said: “Medical students across the world have been able to come together and work with community leaders to address pressing local needs.”
The seven different projects were ongoing over a period of ten weeks, and range from partners as varied as Queens Park Rangers (QPR) in the Community Trust to local community groups and voluntary organisations such as the Community Champions, Sobus, Healthy W12, the BME Health Forum and Healthwatch CWL.
Students taking part in the project also had the opportunity to discuss their plans with international thought leaders, and West London Health Partnership has funded some of the promising projects.
Nafsika Thalassis, the Director of the BME Health Forum, reflected: “The best thing about it was how you found out what was important to the community leaders. As a result, we were doing a project that we thought genuinely mattered.”
Student Shaper Ray Wang added: “What I think makes this type of work more meaningful for the local people and the people involved, is to have a problem and then have some sort of open-ended discussion around how do you go about solving that problem in a way that works for you rather than an idea that works for people that might be sitting in the office suite.”
Communities and medical students tackle health inequalities together
Dr Nina Dutta, course lead in the School of the Public Health, said: “Our students have admirably risen to the challenge of identifying and addressing the needs of the College’s local community. Although this term, currently a voluntary part of their programme, we’ve had a great response to the project. The undergraduate medicine MBBS course has had to shift to delivering education online response to the pandemic. This has posed challenges due to the inherent hands-on nature of healthcare, however the digital community action project has been a successful example of this transition. Here medical students across the world have been able to come together and work with community leader to address pressing local needs. We’re looking forward to learning lessons from this experience, and hopefully being able to see all our students and community partners in person again soon.”
Presenting their projects remotely to their peers on 6 May, one student group’s ‘Community Action Project’ (CAP) has built on past work by the Community Champions Programme and QPR in the Community Trust. The need for the project was identified by the Champions and the Trust early on, with their respective profiles, community and social media reach being key to the project’s sustainability.
The Addison Community Champions and representatives from QPR in the Community Trust are now preparing to create and deliver resource packs for one hundred vulnerable families living in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. The packs will provide items to support children and young people’s creativity and emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, including recipe books and exercise ideas, mental health support, mood journals, arts and crafts materials, and signposting flyers designed by Imperial students.
Barbara Shelton, Project Manager at Addison Community Champions, said: “This is my third year of being involved with Imperial community projects. The students were wonderful. Many have never set foot in a community centre before and don’t necessarily recognise what they’re there for, so that learning experience is always useful. Especially in times like these the medical profession needs to recognise that community leaders are an asset. If students can have those interactions at this early stage of their career, it will change the way they view their communities forever. For our part as community partners, one of the biggest lessons we learn from the students is how to better showcase the work we do, and how we can tackle social inequalities together.”
Another student group, working with the BME Health Forum Director and West London CCG, created accessible, captioned videos in multiple languages (English, Farsi, Sylheti, Kurdish, Somali, and Arabic) to reassure communities in North West London that NHS services continue to be safe to use during the pandemic. Targeted especially to meet the needs of BAME communities, the videos will be shared via community leaders and social media platforms, particularly on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Student Abi Mahendran said: “With A&E attendance 30% lower than in normal times, and with 4% of Londoners not speaking English well, we knew this might be a useful project. We originally had a shortlist of languages we wanted our videos to be translated into, but we’ve found the communities we’re working with are even more diverse and require additional translations. Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to put plans in place to publish even more videos.”
Educational empowerment
All seven projects were taken forward owing to the College’s commitment to continue delivering on its educational mission during the social distancing measures introduced in a number of other countries across the world.
Bethany Golding, Community Collaborations Lead in the School of Public Health, said: “It has been really impressive to see how students and community leaders have come together under challenging circumstances to work on targeted projects that could make a real difference. It was great to work with West London Health Partnership in bringing down funding for these projects where needed, and I am grateful to our inspiring community partners who worked so hard to connect our students with the voices of communities, and are now taking the projects forward. As a Faculty we should be very proud of our students’ engagement with community needs at a very challenging time.”
Third-year medical students Nadia Zaman and Kim Alipio undertook a CAP exploring how global examples of asset-based community development (ABCD) could help to proliferate community-led COVID-19 related initiatives in Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow and Ealing. Nadia said:
“Undertaking the Community Action Project opened my eyes to the challenges faced by different groups in society. Having grown up in London my whole life, doing this research made me more aware of how social determinants of health can impact on residents’ quality of life in different boroughs. I learnt the importance of community collaboration and how great work can be done when communities and organisations come together with the common goal of changing lives for the better.”
Kim noted how the CAP had affected him on both a professional and personal level: “Participating in the CAP has shown to me the affirmative and inclusive aspects of engaging with the community, where anyone and everyone can thrive by working together to achieve common aspirations. Everything I have learnt throughout this project, I will take away and keep close to my heart not only as a medical student, but as a person as well.”
The CAP module is just one of a number of learning experiences created by Imperial’s Undergraduate Primary Care Team in the School of Public Health that are intended to encourage students to collaborate, engage with the communities in which they’re living and working, studying and working in, and gain an authentic understanding of what it means to be a medic in the modern world.