Month: October 2014

Anatomy in Year 1 and 2 MBBS/BSc

living anatomy1It has been a busy summer for the Anatomy Department as the 13th floor Anatomy skills lab has been re-fashioned to allow its partition into clinical cubicles to simulate a clinical environment. We are grateful to everyone who contributed to make this happen such a short space of time. Amazingly we managed to finish the job by the start of term. The length of both DR and Living Anatomy practicals have also been increased this year to allow more time for assimilation of material. We look forward to the students feedback on these improvements.
We are also making an iPad version of the course handbooks available with colour illustrations to download, for those students who have their own iPads.The changes to the skills lab will also benefit the GE 1 students.

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Professor Mary Morrell
Sleep & Respiratory Physiology
Faculty of Medicine

New Seminar Rooms at St Mary’s

3Z1A7274aThanks to a recent project (jointly funded by College and from funds generated through the (LKCMedicine) joint initiative in Singapore) the St Mary’s campus can now offer two brand new seminar rooms which are available for booking.

The project consisted of converting an existing office area within the ground floor St Mary’s medical school into 1 large seminar room, with full College AV provision, and seating for 88, and 1 smaller seminar room with seating for 42, and again full college AV spec.

As an additional enhancement, the smaller seminar room can be sub divided to give a small meeting room/Video conferencing facility, and a 26 person seminar room (has movable wall to divide room).

Both rooms can be combined, to house 130 people, and you can stream same content between the rooms, controlled by larger room AV lectern.

The new rooms can be booked in the usual manner, and are called the “Norfolk Place Teaching Suite“, rooms G64 (large), G65A (small meeting and/or Polycom Video Conferencing) and G65B (26 person seminar room). Both G65A+B need to be booked when space for up to 42 people is required.

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Stephen Pullen
Faculty of Medicine Client Co-ordination Manager
FoM Capital Projects

Pankaj Sharma appointed Professor of Neurology at the University of London

drWe are pleased to announce that Mr Pankaj Sharma has been appointed Professor of Neurology at the University of London and Head of a new cardiovascular research institute at the Royal Holloway College. He will continue a clinical appointment at Imperial College NHS Trust.

Pankaj Sharma is Consultant Neurologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (formerly Hammersmith Hospitals). He has doctorates from Cambridge and London Universities and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Medical School USA.

He leads the internationally renown Imperial College Cerebrovascular Research Unit (ICCRU) and has published widely in major international journals.

Professor Sharma’s clinical interests include: headache, stroke, dizziness, seizures, fits and epilepsy.

Please visit this page for details of Mr Sharma’s experience and publications.

 

Pankaj Sharma MD PhD FRCP
Head, Imperial College Cerebrovascular Research Unit (ICCRU)
Imperial College London & Hammersmith Hospitals

WHOCC members participated in a leadership and health management training in Nairobi

On the 13th of September, members of the WHO Collaborating Centre left to Nairobi, Kenya to conduct a one-week course on Leadership and Health Management. The training, held in partnership with UNICEF Somalia Country Office, targeted high-level health officials of the Somali Ministry of Health, as well as WHO and UNICEF country officials.

The WHOCC leadership training aims to provide current national, regional and local leaders and decision makers the necessary management and leadership skills to cope with every day as well as crisis situations. By becoming better leaders, health officials will be able to contribute to the improvement of the Somali health system and to provide more effective services to the population.

Throughout the course and by means of very hands-on exercises, participants developed leadership skills such as delegation, team work, or evidence-based decision making. Each day was dedicated to a specific area of health management: from leadership skills to quality of care, management in health, policy and strategy, and governance. After receiving their certificates, participants returned to Somalia, with the skills and tools to inspire and influence those around them.

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IGHI Autumn Update

Student Challenges Competition 2014 – a chance for students to win up to £5k in funding towards their global health research project.  Applications deadline: Midnight 28th November 2014.

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Maternal care in Somaliland – IGHI welcomed special guest speaker, Edna Adan Ismail, who presented a seminar on the issues affecting maternal and child health in Somaliland, Africa.

Edna Ismail

IGHI’s Helix Centre publish new End-of-Life Care guidance apps – the HELIX Centre has released Apps on the iTunes and Google Play app stores to provide End of Life Care Guidance to health workers on the front line.

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The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) Invites Innovators To Showcase Their Projects at the 2015 Summit – WISH has announced its first ‘Innovation Showcases’ competition.

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WISH joins forces with Health Affairs to launch September issue – ten articles inspired by the World Innovation Summit for Health featured in September issue of Health Affairs

Health Affairs

Social networking can help people lose weight – social networking programmes designed to help people lose weight could play a role in the global fight against obesity, according to research.  This was one of the ten articles featured in the September issue of Health Affairs.

The Commonwealth Fund’s U.K Harkness Fellowship Scheme – The Centre for Health Policy to coordinate applications on behalf of Imperial & Imperial College NHS Trust, nominating 1 candidate per organisation.

 

Jo Seed
Communications and Events Officer
Institute of Global Health Innovation

IUA Award from the XXVI World Congress in Sydney

The Josef Pflug Vascular Laboratory of Imperial College has recently won the prize for the best oral presentation at the XXVI World Congress of the International Union of Angiology 10th – 14th August 2014 in Sydney, Australia with entry number #820. The certificate was given to Mr Christopher Lattimer MBBS, FRCS, MS, PhD from Professor John Fletcher, Chairman of congress and President elect of the IUA, on behalf of the team and collaborators.

The award was for recognising that D-dimer levels taken from the leg in patients with chronic venous insufficiency were increased in comparison to their arm blood samples. The research arose from the hypothesis that local blood samples would be a better reflexion of local pathology than a systemic sample from the arm which has been altered through several organs and capillary beds. This led to the development of the ankle cubital D-dimer ratio (ACDR) which may be a more specific test at detecting pro-thrombotic states in the leg, like venous disease or a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The advantage of the ACDR over a single arm sample is that it is not dependent on the age of the patient and it is unrelated to the type of measuring assay. Future studies are underway to determine whether this test may improve the specificity of D-dimer as a screening test in the detection of DVT.

The prize was awarded to our team which includes our overseas collaborators, Professor Jawed Fareed, Professor Debra Hoppensteadt and Daneyal Syed from the Department of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, Loyola University, Chicago, USA. The rest of our team from the Josef Pflug vascular laboratory (http://josefpflugvascular.com) at Ealing hospital and Imperial College includes Dr Evi Kalodiki, Senior Research Fellow, and the head of our Department, Mr George Geroulakos.

Call for workshop ideas for the Faculty Teaching Forum

Dear all,

You are probably aware that the faculty teaching forum will be held this year on Thursday 27 November  12.45–5pm in the Glenister Lecture Theatre on the Charing Cross campus.

It is open to all staff who teach at Imperial and as ever promises to be a stimulating afternoon where we can learn together and enhance our knowledge of education. There is a theme of resilience and compassion and there will be an afternoon of talks and workshops together with a panel debate on “How do we promote resilience in our students?”

We are keen to make it relevant to you, our teachers and have some ideas from the feedback received last year.
However we would like to give you the chance to contribute to the event by running a workshop for your colleagues on any topic – not necessarily related to the theme. Current workshops include, “how to improve your lecturing skills” and “teaching on the run: how to teach in a busy clinic” as well as mindfulness  and a workshop on resilience vs compassion in our students.
The workshop would be a one hour session from 3.30 to 4.30 for a mixed group of approximately ten participants (clinicians, academics and support staff) and should be designed to be interactive.

Please contact either Professor Karim Meeran k.meeran@imperial.ac.uk, Dr Jo Harris joanne.harris@imperial.ac.uk, Dr Sonia Kumar Sonia.kumar@imperial.ac.uk or Dr Graham Easton g.easton@imperial.ac.uk  with any ideas you have for a workshop and feel free to discuss them with us if they are still at an early stage.

Due to lack of space we will not unfortunately be able to use all your ideas but possibly we can feed them forward to other events.

 

Excellent improvement in student satisfaction rates at the School of Medicine

The School of Medicine has seen an excellent improvement in the 2014 National Student Survey result, with overall satisfaction increasing 7% to 90% – putting it 4% above the sector average.

Martin Lupton, Head of the Undergraduate School of Medicine, puts the improvements down to greater emphasis within the school on listening to students’ feedback:

“We’ve spent a lot of time actively listening to our students and it’s clearly had an impact. We have strong staff-student liaison groups, town hall meetings with our students and I have a lunch each week with a group of 12 -14 students randomly chosen from across the school.  These help us identify exactly where there are issues and how we can best address them. It was this kind of feedback that led us to revamp our tutoring system, bringing in a smaller number of well-trained tutors with allocated time to undertake the role.”

Susan English, Director of Education Management, also highlighted the strong sense of community within the medical school as a contributing factor to the positive environment:

“Led by Jenny Higham, Vice-Dean (Education and Institutional Affairs), there’s been a push to raise the profile of the School and develop a stronger identity which I think has helped increase the feeling of community for our staff and students. When you have over 2,000 students operating over four teaching sites, 30 hospital sites and dozens of general practices it can be a challenge to instil a sense of belonging.  We have also increased the emphasis on celebrating students’ progression through their studies.  For example, we have a welcome dinner with all first year students and staff and a ‘white coat’ ceremony, when they commence their Year 3 clinical attachments so that staff and students come together to celebrate this milestone.”

This year’s results for medicine have seen improvements across all of the surveyed areas. As well as overall satisfaction increasing, improvements in Academic Support of 13% and Organisation and Management of 15% were the highest by any department College-wide.

Chris Harris, Quality and Educational Development Manager added:

“It’s important to stress though that we’re not complacent. We’re over the moon with this year’s results but there is lots more still be done. We’ve made a commitment to continue listening to our students and working with them to improve their experience and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Chris Harris
Quality and Educational Development Manager
Faculty of Medicine

Professor Ten Feizi receives the prestigious 2014 Rosalind Kornfeld Award

The Department of Medicine is delighted that Professor Ten Feizi is the recipient of the prestigious 2014 Rosalind Kornfeld Award from The Society for Glycobiology. The Rosalind Kornfeld Award for Lifetime Achievement in Glycobiology was established in 2008 to honour the distinguished scientific career and service to the Society by Dr Rosalind Kornfeld. The award is given by the Society to scientists who have, over their professional lifetimes, made significant contributions with important impact on the field.  In Professor Feizi’s case this award is in recognition of her many achievements in the fields of structure analysis, immunology and function of glycans over nearly 50 years.

Imperial successfully recruited Professor Ten Feizi in 1994 when the Northwick Park Campus became affiliated with the College. Her research group was already a leading world centre in glycobiology, notably having established the specificity of human monoclonal antibodies for specific oligosaccharide sequences and the observed programmed changes in expression of blood group-related sequences during embryogenesis, cell differentiation and oncogenesis, research published in Nature that became a seminal publication in the field. The group then went on to introduce neoglycolipid (NGL) technology for lipid-linked oligosaccharide probes and in 2002 this became the first glycoarray system intended to encompass entire glycomes. This is currently the most diverse glycoarray system in the world, revolutionizing the molecular dissection of pathogen-host interactions as well as endogenous recognition systems. Recent highlights are assignments of the host cell receptors for the oncogenic simian virus 40 (SV40) and the pandemic A(H1N1) 2009 influenza virus. In recognition of the importance of this ground-breaking work, Prof Ten Feizi received recognition with membership to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Joanna Thompson
Divisional Manager, Division of Immunology & Inflammation
Department of Medicine

The School of Medicine Mobile Medical Education Pilot Project

The School issued iPads Mini to students in years 5 and 6 of the MBBS course at the beginning of the 2013/14 academic term.

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The key implementations introduced as part of the pilot have focused on the following areas:

iBooks

iBooks have been developed in order to standardise the delivery of course related materials for the different clinical attachments. Once the iBooks are downloaded on the iPads, they can be accessed offline. The iBooks offer a range of interactions designed by academics to make the learning experience more engaging for students. The image below shows some of the iBooks developed for years 5 and 6.

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Students can download the iBooks via the Mobile Device Management System (MDM): AirWatch Secure Content Locker provided by ICT.

Overall, the feedback received from academics and students has been very positive. They like the fact the iBooks can be accessed off-line and they provide a lot of engaging interactions.

The iBooks developed can be accessed via the iPad Project Organisation in Blackboard: http://bit.ly/1rlBKXF

Electronic submissions and signoffs

iPad_lectureElectronic submissions and signoffs have been piloted using the eForms iPad App. It allows submissions of assessments (end of attachment, DOPS, etc.) via student iPads.  The system allows clinicians to electronically sign forms online/offline and to receive an electronic copy of the submissions via email. Students also receive confirmation via email and administrators can track submissions online.

SharePoint has also been piloted for electronic submissions in years 3, 5 and 6 to accommodate open-ended questions requiring formatting as well as submitting attachments (PDF, Word documents, etc.).

In total, over 100 electronic submissions have been introduced in years 5 & 6. Feedback so far has been positive although some students have expressed preference for paper based submissions.

iCalendars

iCalendars have also been deployed for some clinical attachments (nearly 100 iCalendars), allowing students to access their calendars/timetables on their iPads and/or smartphones. Due to the positive feedback received from students on the use of iCalendars, the School has decided to implement iCalendars for all clinical attachments from January 2015.

Other Apps

We have also received positive feedback on the use of virtual clickers especially during the Pathology course. The students have also been very receptive to the use of the BMJ Best Practice App provided by the library.

The work done so far on the Mobile Medical Education Pilot Project provides evidence of the benefits in the provision of electronic submissions, iCalendars and the distribution of course and learning related materials on the students’ devices via iBooks. The digitisation of clinical related assessments (e-forms) provides a more efficient and robust mechanism to audit assessment submissions during attachments.

A Working Group will be setup to evaluate the iPad pilot and make recommendations to the School on the way forward in relation to the School’s Mobile Learning Strategy. The recommendations will be made available by February 2015.

A CPD course: ‘Creating Mobile Medical Education: Successful Implementation in Practice’ has been setup based on the experience gained during this project at the School. All the implementations carried out as part of this project will be demonstrated during the course.

Guest speakers from Manchester and Leeds Medical Schools will also present their latest developments on Mobile Medical Education. For further information about the course please visit: http://bit.ly/1AR24tQ

For further information contact us at: elearning.medicine@imperial.ac.uk

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Dr Maria Toro-Troconis
E-Learning Strategy and Development Manager
Faculty of Medicine