The participants, facilitators and judges of the first national-level Health Care Team Challenge in a photocall.
MELAKA: The first national-level Health Care Team Challenge™ (HCTCTM) was held at the Melaka-Manipal Medical College (MMMC) here as one of the events during ICON-IPEPC (International Conference on Inter-professional Education, Practice & Care) held on Dec 17 – 18 last year.
HCTCTM is a competition-based learning method, during which the students from different health professions collaborate in teams to solve a complex health issue.
Thirty students from five universities participated in this inaugural event which included six dental students from MMMC, six dietetic students from the International Medical University (IMU), six nursing students from International Medical College (IMC), three medical students from MMMC, three medical students from Monash University Malaysia (MUM), three pharmacy students from SEGi University and three other pharmacy students from MUM.
The facilitators were Benny, Dr Amudha, Dr Vanassa and Dr Thor from MUM, Professor Soumendra and Professor Vivekanada from MMMC, Sunanthiny from SEGI University, Dr Snigdha from IMU and Dr Jalina from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
During this HCTCTM event, five teams, each consisting of one dental, dietetic, medical, nursing and pharmacy student worked together to produce an inter- professional care plan for a patient suffering from heart attack, irregular heart rhythm and kidney disease.
“At the beginning I was reluctant to participate because I thought that it was not useful to me as a dental student. But this event opened my eyes, there are a lot of things I can learn from other professions,” said Royle, a dental student from MMMC.
“For me, I learned a lot from the nursing student in my team. I never realise that nursing students have such a good clinical knowledge,” said Brian Chong, a pharmacy student from MUM.
Professor John Gilbert, a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert on Inter-professional Education (IPE) congratulated the organisers and students for making the event a success.
“Health care team challenge™ is a tremendous way of learning. I am glad that the students looked so engaged,” said Gilbert who was also a keynote speaker for the conference.
HCTCTM was first introduced by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 1989 and has since been an annual event in Canada, United States, Australia and Japan. In Malaysia, HCTCTM was first conducted within MUM in 2017.