Teaching to the void: meeting the challenges of virtual teaching and learning – Louise Stone & Lex Lucas

Monday June 3, 8:00am AEST

This session will be an interactive workshop demonstrating some of the techniques and strategies you can utilise to encourage engagement in online learning. It should be a good introduction to the virtual classroom environment.

Education Integration project presentations

Wednesday June 5, 8:00am AND 3:00 pm AEST

These two sessions will showcase the projects completed last year, and highlight “lessons learned” for current EIP project team members.

Selection: How do we select registrars into AGPT and what is the evidence behind it? – Fiona Patterson

Wednesday June 5, 7:00pm AEST

In this session, we will be looking at the evidence behind our selection process, and the rationale for the use of the SJT in the Australian context.

Survey Design workshop – Kelsey Hegarty

Friday June 7, 1:30pm AEST

This interactive workshop is based on the survey design short course developed by the University of Melbourne. We will be looking at effective survey design, particularly focussing on developing good survey questions. Participants will collaborate using “survey monkey” to generate short questionnaires which will be discussed and refined using peer and expert feedback.

Synthesising the literature on the role of the GP Supervisor – Susan Wearne

Friday, June 7, 5:00pm AEST

We all know that supervisors are a scarce and precious resource. To be able to meet the supervision needs of our growing numbers of learners in general practice, it will be necessary to train more supervisors. To do this, we will need a clearer picture of what supervisors actually do in practice. In this session, Susan Wearne will present the evidence from her research on GP supervision, and discuss some of the challenges facing supervisors in contemporary general practice.

To register your interest and view the full program and great Research Week resources online visit www.researchweek.com.au or follow on Twitter at @GPETResearchWk

The winner will be funded to attend the RACGP’s premier event of the year, GP13 in Darwin from 17–19 October 2013.

A nominee must be a general practice registrar who is currently enrolled in the Fellowship in Advanced Rural General Practice through a regional training provider (RTP).

The nominee must have:

• Demonstrated commitment to rural general practice
• Demonstrated commitment to learning and developing as a rural general practitioner
• Evidence of service to rural patients
• Evidence of commitment and service to the rural practice in which they work
• Evidence of service to the rural community in which they practice or have practiced

For more information and nomination details please visit www.racgp.org.au/rural/awards

Applications must be received by 5.00 pm (AEST) 14 June 2013.

Do you know a GP who’s mentoring and support enables rural GPs to safely dedicate themselves to their patients, their families and their communities.

The Brian Williams Award is presented by the RACGP National Rural Faculty (NRF) to commemorate the work of Dr Brian Williams, a rural GP and medical educator. Dr Williams was a staunch advocate for rural general practice, rural medical education at all levels, and the need for rural GPs to provide support to their peers in order to advance rural general practice.

The aim of this award is to acknowledge medical practitioners, whose mentoring and support enables rural GPs to safely dedicate themselves to their patients, their families and their communities.

The Brian Williams Award is the highest accolade awarded by the RACGP National Rural Faculty (NRF) to a College member who has made a significant contribution to the personal and professional welfare and wellbeing of rural general practitioners.

For more information and nomination details please visit www.racgp.org.au/rural/awards

Applications must be received by 5.00 pm (AEST) 14 June 2013.

GPET have proposed guidelines to direct the relationships of RTP around practices wishing to take registrars from more than one RTP.  The purpose is to ensure when a registrar from another RTP arrives at a practice their training is of a suitable quality and supervisors aren’t overloaded with registrars.  With the new arrangements, the practice will be required to go through accreditation with the second RTP before the registrar is placed if that registrar is not permitted to transfer to the original accrediting RTP.

The position of QRME remains that if we are unable to fill a requirement for a registrar then practices should certainly seek a registrar from another RTP, and QRME will also be seeking a registrar from another RTP for the practice.  We have had some success in placing registrars from Sydney and Melbourne seeking rural terms.  

Our position won’t change – QRME will do it’s best to fill, but if we can’t fill, getting a registrar from somewhere else should definitely happen.  Either QRME will find one or the practice should ask the other Qld RTP.  Should a registrar from one of the other RTP be found, the practice may need to do another accreditation with the second RTP.

These arrangements have been agreed to by all three Qld RTP.  We will be around practices discussing whether these changes work for practices.  Please call me if you have any questions or suggestions on 07 4638 7999.

Adelaide to Outback
Lower Level, 183 Melbourne Street
North Adelaide SA 

Please note there are two delivery methods available to candidates for the 12 & 13 October StAMPS exam, with candidates able to select a preference on the enrolment form of their preferred delivery i.e. face to face or videoconferencing. While ACRRM will take candidates preferences for delivery format into consideration we are not able to guarantee their preference until after enrolment closing date on 19th July 2013. For candidates that have already enrolled prior to advertising the location of the face to face location, these candidates will be given 1st preference. We will also give these candidates the option to change their delivery method if they desire.

For enrolments into ACRRM assessment including the October StAMPS exam please follow the link to the Assessment Webpage ACRRM Assessment

If you have any questions regarding ACRRM assessment please contact assessment@acrrm.org.au

The Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS) courses teach a systematic approach to medical management of disasters. This approach can be applied to any major incident. The emphasis is on the scene management and the majority of the courses are competency-based and participants are tested in the practical application of the skills taught and practised.

Nomination forms are available at the AGPT website. For further information please contact sofia.polak@gpet.com.au.

The awards will be presented at the 2013 GPET Convention which will be held at Crown, Perth WA 11-12 September.

Dr Jeff Thomsett speaking at the QRME Supervisor and Practice Managers Conference 2012

Good evening ladies, gentlemen and colleagues. Tonight I am going to walk you through a potted history of my life in medicine over the past 44 years. I apologise to the non-medical among you but sometimes I cannot help lapsing into medical jargon. I was a Queensland Health Scholarship holder and consequently was bonded to QH for seven years. Fortunately I enjoyed every one of them.

I spent my internship at Ipswich Hospital where I had a medical superintendent who understood that I was to be subject to a rural posting the following year. He ensured that I would receive the very best procedural training in Surgery, Obstetrics and Anaesthetics during my year at Ipswich. The hours were long and the pay was short, but I certainly learned a lot.

After I completed my surgery term, the MS gave me a weekly operating list of my own which was supervised by the surgeon in the next theatre. I was doing lists of Hernias, Interval Appendisectomies and Varicose Veins every week. My anaesthetic skills were kept up to date by the frequent after hours emergency surgery lists. During my obstetric term I was shown how to perform an exchange transfusion on a neonate and this became one of my prime responsibilities as the hospital did not have a specialist paediatrician at that time. The paediatric department was overseen by Dr Stuart Patterson who was a very experienced general practitioner and one of the founding fathers of the RACGP. He actually taught me how to make a starch poultice for treating Eczema – a very cruel and drastic treatment which pretty much replaced the rash with a second degree burn. As it turned out I wasn’t posted immediately to a rural town but continued at Ipswich until the end of April. Gayle and I had been married in January and lived in a small flat from which Gayle commuted daily to work in Brisbane. During this period I fulfilled the role of the obstetric registrar at Ipswich Hospital.

The beginning of May found us in Mareeba – a veritable League of Nations. There were Italians, Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, Turks and Spaniards, but mostly Italians. It was difficult to find an English speaking voice when walking down the main street. The town was the centre of a thriving tobacco industry and the local tobacco industry supported the hospital generously through the tobacco growers cooperative and the hospital auxiliary. The hospital practice was exciting to say the least with a constant procession of violent injuries presenting.  The first weekend I was in Mareeba a man presented with a stab wound his back. He was Croatian and had been courting one of the hospital domestics who came from a Serbian family. Her father had met him in a local hotel and had gone home returning with a fishing knife which he plunged into the victim’s back. I had never seen a chest drain inserted let alone done one, however working from first principles two drains were inserted and an underwater collecting system was hurriedly improvised. The patient survived. The old man was tried in the district court and was acquitted!

Mary Moonshine was an attractive young aboriginal lass who lived at Chillagoe about 90 km west of Mareeba. She was in an abusive relationship with a man who lived off her earnings as the local prostitute. She was involved in a nasty motor vehicle accident and sustained a compound fracture of her pelvis with bone fragments penetrating her vagina. She was referred to Cairns Base Hospital for treatment as the management was complicated by a Gonococcal Bone infection. She underwent an operation where the front of her pelvis was removed altogether. After recovery she returned to her old ways. Her next injury occurred when her boyfriend bit off her ear in a moment of passion. The nurse at Chillagoe reported by phone and asked if she could have a go at reattaching the ear. She did an excellent job and it healed quite nicely. The final episode in this case was another injury where the boyfriend kicked her in the abdomen rupturing her Liver and causing her death.

There was an elderly man in his late 70s who presented just before Christmas with vomiting of large amounts of blood. He was a retired camel driver who had spent his life in central Australia. At this time referral was not an option – there was flooding of the creeks below the range and aerial retrievals were a rarity and only done by fixed wing aircraft. The man was transfused with O negative blood from our large donor panel, however we were having trouble keeping up the blood. We took him to theatre and performed exploratory surgery, finding a mass in his stomach. On opening his stomach there was a large tumour on the lesser curvature of the Stomach which was bleeding freely. The left Gastric Artery was ligated, stopping the bleeding instantly. After recovery the patient refused further referral or any other investigation. It was gratifying to see him written up in the Australian Women’s Weekly some years later.

On another occasion a group of bikies were riding from Cairns to Atherton. At Mareeba the road took a tight left turn which the lead bikie missed altogether, riding straight into the bush. About twenty of his colleagues followed him. The ambulance ran a shuttle service from the accident site to the hospital. Most of the injuries were exhaust pipe burns but there were a few wrist fractures as well. This was a challenge not only for me but for the nursing staff as well.

During a normal outpatient session, I had a young man walk into my consulting room with his hand over his forehead. He had been involved in the building of a house at Kuranda and a beam had fallen on his head. When he removed his hand, I was horrified to see his frontal lobe on his forehead. He was referred to Cairns.

Snake bite was common. One young man was bitten but decided to finish chopping the firewood for his mother before coming to hospital. On arrival he was sweaty, weak, with slurred speech and drooping eyelids. The only diagnostic tool we had at the time was the clotting time. IV lines were inserted and a tube of blood collected for the clotting time which was placed in the ample bosom of the outpatient sister. It never clotted. By this time however we had administered two vials of Polyvalent Antivenene which was all we were allowed to keep on hand together with some Fibrinogen which was used in those days to correct the clotting time. He required ventilating for three days via an old Bird respirator in the general ward.

There was always a motor vehicle accident somewhere. I once intubated a patient in the middle of the Mulligan Highway at Mt Carbine. He had a base of skull fracture and eventually died after being retrieved by road. On another occasion I had the nerve wracking task of looking after a former Medical Superintendent of the hospital who had sustained a severe concussion and on yet another occasion removed a spleen on a patient injured in a crash during one of the old Redex car trials.

The indigenous people of Mareeba lived in the most appalling conditions on the edge of town. The accommodation was most rusty galvanised iron shacks or half rain water tanks and they were served by only one tap for water for the whole community. A family of eight children were brought to the hospital one day by the police. Their parents had gone walkabout and left the children in the care of their grandfather. The younger children were bottle fed and had had no milk for some days. They were surviving on an infusion made from pumpkin leaves. I was required to testify that they were in need of care and protection and they ended up staying in the hospital for some weeks. The grandfather subsequently tried to incite some of his fellows to violence against me because I had given evidence.

Obstetrically speaking, the hospital was very busy with about 350 confinements per year most of which were public patients. During my time there, there were several babies born with severe Neural Tube defects including Anencephaly and severe Spina Bifida. In conjunction with Queensland Health we tried to find a common denominator for these cases and sent many samples of breast milk and blood to Brisbane, however no causal link was found. Other cases included severe prematurity and ladies having their 12th or 13th child. A midwifery school was started while I was there and we took on two trainees per year. This was quite successful with our trainees succeeding in the state examinations.

The surgery was also challenging. There were weekly lists of Tonsils and Adenoids, Hernias and other minor procedures and many emergencies such as Perforated Peptic Ulcer and Ectopic Pregnancy.

Medical students became a regular part of our life and I enjoyed having them.

Socially life was also busy. I became a member of Rotary and we got to know several other young couples who were displaced persons like us. Our first child was born in Mareeba and made our lives even busier if that was possible.

We moved to Dalby Hospital at the beginning of 1973. This was a ‘one doctor hospital with a full time Medical Superintendent. Work here was very busy. Ward rounds started at 7am followed by outpatients at 8am through to midday. On one occasion to my shame I saw 100 outpatients in the morning. Afternoons were taken up with Anaesthetic lists as there was a resident surgeon in town at that time. All of these activities were interrupted by the usual trickle of emergencies. At the beginning of my second year in Dalby there was a second doctor appointed to the hospital which made life much easier. The nursing staff was very supportive especially after hours and tried not to disturb me except for truly genuine emergencies. When the surgeon was away, I took on the role and one night had a patient with an Incarcerated Inguinal Hernia which had become gangrenous. This involved a small bowel resection and Anastomosis as well as the Hernia repair. At one time there was a locum GP Anaesthetist in town who performed the first Epidural Anaesthetic I had seen for a Caesarean Section. The patient was the critical care nurse at the hospital and it was quite disconcerting to have a conversation with the patient while performing surgery. She was watching the procedure reflected in the theatre light.

Life was also very busy outside the hospital. I joined the Lions Club and served a year as President, as well I was involved with the Dalby Day Nursery and Preschool Association also including a year as President. I also joined a syndicate which leased a horse for the picnic races and one year had the good fortune to draw our horse in the Calcutta. The horse won. I got to keep the prize – a crystal water set and the cash winnings paid the horse’s feed bill and the trainer’s fee. While in Dalby our second and third children were born.

After the term of my government bondage expired I saw an advertisement for a position on Christmas Island which I applied for and won. We moved there at the beginning of 1977. Our children were five, three and 18 months.

Christmas Island Hospital was an isolated two doctor practice owned and run by the British Phosphate Commissioners. BPC was an anachronism, being formed with representatives of the governments of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The island was tax free at that time. The supervisors were mostly recruited in Australia and the labour was recruited in SE Asia and paid at Asian rates. This meant that there was a division along racial lines as well as along income lines. This had led to the formation of the union of Christmas Island Workers about a year or so before we arrived on the island. The union was very active in pursuing improved rights for its membership. The hospital was considered a department of the overall business on an equal footing with engineering, production and accounting and the Medical Superintendent had an equal voice in management decisions. There were about 40 staff members at the hospital. The doctors, dentist, pharmacist, five registered nurse midwives and a laboratory scientist were engaged in Australia and the remainder were recruited in Singapore and Malaysia. The enrolled nurses also performed the duties of interpreter.

The Island was serviced by one flight from Perth per fortnight and in the other week there would be a flight from Singapore or Kuala Lumpur alternately. All supplies of food and other items arrive by sea on ships which would take away bulk phosphate to Australia or New Zealand.

In the hospital, fractures were a fairly regular feature of the practice, nearly always from leisure pursuits rather than work accidents. Most simple and compound fractures were managed locally with those requiring internal fixation being the only ones referred. A fractured femur would displace six passengers on a chartered aircraft to make way for the Thomas splint and stretcher. Obstetric management was exciting with delivery of previously undiagnosed twins and breech deliveries taken in our stride. Many of the Muslim women had contracted pelvises a leftover of childhood rickets and the caesarean section rate in this group was high. Antenatal care of the Muslim women was also difficult as they would not permit intimate examination by male doctors until they were in labour. The PAP smear rate among this group was very low, as was regular breast examination: Most women waited until they were on leave for these procedures.

A child was born with an Oesophageal Atresia or absence of the food pipe to its stomach. The child was given IV fluids and continuous pharyngeal suction while an evacuation was arranged. At that time there was a strike at Perth airport and no traffic could depart or land.

An Air Force Hercules was arranged from Richmond Air Force Base in New South Wales. This giant aircraft flew via Perth to pick up a team of specialists and arrived at Christmas Island for an uneventful return to Perth. This child was also born with an accessory thumb. Some weeks later after returning to the island, an intrauterine device was removed at the mother’s postnatal check! The child had a stormy first few years with frequent Aspiration Pneumonias.

The large single male population meant that there was always an upsurge in sexually transmitted illnesses whenever a plane landed from South East Asia. Thailand was a popular destination for these men. Occasionally I would be required to go aboard a passing ship to look after an injured crew member or passenger. Some of these ships were super tankers displacing ½ million tonnes. Their decks were the length of five football fields and the crew moved around on motor scooters. Christmas Island was one of the few places where these ships could make landfall because of the depth of the ocean. Once aboard it was usual to visit the bridge by lift to the 20th floor. On a separate occasion I was required to go aboard a passing cargo ship on which one of the crew members had run amok. Amok is a real condition among people of Malay or Indonesian extraction. The man had been jilted by his boyfriend – another crew member. He had invaded the bridge and wrecked the ship’s telegraph and radar, leaving the captain to navigate with a Sextant and Chronometer. He was sedated, brought ashore and evacuated by special charter back to Malaysia. The only other case of amok I saw was also a matter of a broken heart where an island lad had been disappointed by his girlfriend. In this case he tried to kill the new man in her life.

During my time on the Island I witnessed a case of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease which is similar to mad cow disease and a solitary case of Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis, a rare and fatal complication of measles. Both these patients had the diagnoses confirmed at autopsy. Other unusual cases included Typhoid, several cases of Tuberculosis and Hansen’s Disease.

Whenever the dentist took his leave from the island I was required to look after his dental emergencies: This involved a daily clinic of extractions. One after another the unfortunate patients would sit in the chair while I administered a mandibular block or infiltration of local anaesthetic and return to the waiting room. By the time the last anaesthetic was administered it was time to pull out the first tooth, so the patients recycled through the chair once again. On average I would draw about ten teeth per day. Some of the less extreme cavities were able to be dressed and await the return of the dentist.

My job also required me to be the quarantine inspector on the Island. On one occasion one of the returning workers tried to smuggle in a mongoose which he carried inside his shirt. The animal was confiscated and I was to oversee its disposal. The local constabulary put it inside a rubbish bin and then fired their pistols at it. I think it took about 24 shots before the mission was finally accomplished. There were a number of chicken farms on the island and I was expected to see that the birds were healthy. There was always a danger of Newcastle Disease being imported with a batch of chickens which required vaccination certificates on entry. The worst cases of unhealthy chickens I saw was an infestation of Bird Lice which was treated by dipping the birds into a sulphur solution prepared by the pharmacist. I also operated on animals – de sexing cats and dogs was done for a fee which went towards the nurses’ amenities fund. There were also occasional feline dental abscesses requiring extraction.

The supervisory staff were coming under increasing harassment from the Union of Christmas Island Workers and a new union was formed – the Christmas Island Professional and Salaried Officers Association. I was elected the second president of this union and was required to represent the members in mediation before a Supreme Court Judge from the Australian Federal Court. Towards the end of the decade there was a new General Secretary of the UCIW who was a total anarchist. A general strike was called and some of the hospital staff wanted to join the striking workers. I went to the hospital in the middle of the night to try to dissuade them from industrial action because I could see that whatever else happened the hospital would still need to function. I was relieved when they accepted my advice. Many of the supervisory staff took over the day to day tasks on the island such as garbage collection and several of the wives were involved in running the trade store which was the equivalent of the supermarket. In 1980 there was a big upheaval with the Australian Government replacing the BPC with the Phosphate Mining Company of Christmas Island.

The British Phosphate Commissioners had previously also had oversight of phosphate extraction on Ocean Island and Nauru in the Pacific. This required them to appoint a Chief Medical Officer to monitor the three hospitals. My CMO happened to be Sir Edward Dunlop or ‘Weary’ as he was known. He would make an annual trip to the island and always expected us to provide an operating list. We would save up a few hernias and other odds and ends we would normally have done ourselves. I would be the anaesthetist on these occasions. He would sometimes bring his wife who unfortunately was showing the early signs of dementia. On one occasion I was on study leave for the North Queensland Medical Conference and was at my parents’ home in Brisbane waiting for my flight to Singapore when I received a call asking me to fly to Melbourne to meet him. He met me at the airport and whipped me off to a silvertail cocktail party in Toorak where I sat in a corner watching the beautiful people until it was time to leave. He then drove me to his home and we had a chat for about an hour about nothing in particular then he took me to a hotel and I flew to Singapore the next morning to join my flight back to Christmas Island.

The social life was also very busy. There were frequent dinners for visiting dignitaries, department head dinners, garden parties and the clubs. The Christmas Island Club was purely a social organisation. The Boat Club, of which I am a past Commodore, sponsored fishing competitions and sailing races in mirror dinghies. It also hosted magnificent social events with imported seafood or barbecues with four pigs and a sheep roasted on spits simultaneously. The Cricket Club took itself quite seriously and ran a competition for four teams. There were also a golf club and other associations such as the Chinese Literary Association and the Poon Saan Club which was a cover for a Chinese gambling den.

We came to Oakey in1984 when our oldest child was starting secondary school. We bought a solo practice behind a shopfront in the main street and maintained a busy practice. It was a conscious decision to step back from the procedural work which had been so much of my life. The practice grew and the landlord had ideas for redevelopment which would have left us with inadequate space. We bought an old house which had previously been a lying-in home conducted by a midwife. We renovated and installed ramps. It was in these rooms that I first took in registrars. I enjoyed the teaching and demonstrating minor procedures. The practice grew and soon we were taking on other doctors, one as an associate and one part time female doctor. The old house proved quite costly to maintain and we decided to take the radical step of totally rebuilding. The practice moved to the Presbyterian manse next door and the old building was sold for removal. Very soon a new purpose built facility was constructed and open for business.

In 1992 I was recruited by the Cunningham Centre to run the Rural Doctors Training

Program which ran for several years with weekly morning lectures delivered by tele-conference and also to several devoted in-person attendees. About this time I was also approached by the RACGP Training Program to consider running a rural training program from Toowoomba. This tied in quite nicely with the Cunningham Centre job and I think they were both mutually beneficial. At the end of 1999 I was asked by the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland to help design a curriculum for a rural rotation for third year medical students. At that time it was to be run from two nodes – one in Toowoomba and the other in Rockhampton. In 2000 I was asked to set up a rural clinical school in Toowoomba where selected students would complete the whole of their third or fourth years of the medical course locally. There was some philosophical opposition from some of the local specialists, but finally they were persuaded that it could work and work it did. I enjoyed working with the students and the teaching I was doing, but the bureaucracy of UQ is enough to grind anyone down. I retired.

I soon found it was not to be. I was asked to go to Roma as a locum Medical Superintendent for six months. There had been considerable friction between the district management and the local practitioners. Having completed that task I found myself heading to Karratha in Western Australia to be a locum SMO in the Nichol Bay Hospital there. A number of other locum jobs followed around Queensland. I was asked to step in as the Senior Medical Educator with RRQC and have been more or less doing that ever since. The time has now come where I do not enjoy the work as much as I used to so I believe it is time to step away and, who knows, perhaps do something different.

QRME have been implementing QRME QuickBase as an online database solution to provide a replacement for GPrime, a simple interface for the storage of training information and an easy way to communicate that data to you.

Access has been provided for all current Registrars and this will be expanded to include currently active Supervisors by the end of February.

What can I see on QRME QuickBase?

• Personal details
• Training placements
• Training Activities
• Learning Plan
• Supervisor Liaison Officer and Registrar Liaison Officer contact details
• Report templates for submission
• Educational Grant Application Requests
• And more!

If there’s something you can’t find or need help with QRME QuickBase, please contact QRME office 4638 7999 or email Bron Chandler (b.chandler@qrme.org.au)

GPET invites all registrars, junior doctors, supervisors, medical and cultural educators, RTP and practice staff, and cultural mentors to submit abstracts individually or in collaboration before 30 March 2013.

Download the Call for Abstract brochure to find out more.

From the outside it could be perceived that being involved in tertiary education makes for quiet summers. This is not the case! Evaluation, planning and development of the Longlook Program is ongoing and is often set into overdrive over the summer months. This year has been no exception. We have made several additions to the Longlook program for 2013 including an extensive schedule of teaching sessions and a new mentor program being led by intern level members of our alumni. 2013 is set to be our biggest and best year yet.

Inaugural Summer Scholarship Program

In an effort to encourage medical students to conduct and plan for research, QRME has designed and administered a pilot of the Summer Scholarship Program. The topics covered included:

• Tracking  the health of local farmers and QRME GP fellows
• How interns are assessed
• Patient attitudes to trainees in the GP setting
• Attitudes of medical students to the practice of rural medicine
• Surgery in QRMLP 
• Development of KFP and MCQ for our registrars
• The history and future of medical training
• Collation, analysis and development of the QRME exit interview
• Mental First Aid training – is there a need?
• Exploration of medical students’ polyprofessionalism

The  program was an overwhelming success. Students all worked very hard and produced high quality and important findings in a very short space of time. In 2013 we plan to follow through on the hard work by implementing, developing or continuing or publishing each project. A special thanks to all the students involved in the Program and to all the QRME staff for your support and participation.

First Wave Scholarship +

Over the summer break six Griffith and UQ medical students took part in a short but intense summer placement program aimed to promote General Practice in the rural setting to 1st and 2nd year students in Warwick and Kingaroy. All students enjoyed their placements and have expressed their gratitude for the opportunity. A big thank you to QRME staff and involved training sites, especially Dr Blair Koppen, Dr Raymond Lewandowski, Dr Nova Evans and Mrs Kerrie Zeller  for making these placements possible.

2013

With a new building to try out and our largest ever cohort of students, the 2013 QRMLP orientation held from the 16/1 – 18/1 was always going to be a big week. The goal of the 3 days was to cover all the aspects of the 3rd and 4th year medicine curriculum that QRMLP students would need to hit the ground running and then some! No sweat!!! In an attempt to reach our goal we worked with a team of QRME medical educators and QRMLP Alumni 2013 interns to develop a packed training and social schedule. We offered our 2013 cohort a range of clinical skills and knowledge and the opportunity to reflect on the expectations and obligations that come with being part of our innovative program. The added bonus of having the QRME registrars learning and training with us, presented extra opportunities for vertical integration, career mentoring and a social atmosphere. A very big thanks to Miss Emily McConochie for her unrelenting positive attitude and all her hard work in coordinating two training programs within one week. The student feedback has been very positive.