QU Health hosts 8th IPE Student Forum

The Interprofessional Education (IPE) Student Association at Qatar University (QU) organised its 8th Annual IPE Forum in collaboration with student members from Weill Cornell Medicine Qatar (WCM-Q), the University of Calgary-Qatar (UCQ), and the University of Doha for Science and Technology (UDST).The event aimed to enhance collaboration among health profession students and to promote the experiences they gained through learning. In her welcome speech, Prof Asmaa al-Thani, Vice President for Health and Medical Sciences at QU, shed light on the significance of integrated healthcare education as a measure of academic excellence at QU Health Science and Medicine."These collective experiences are important to understand the possible challenges and potential solutions of healthcare practices," she added.Dr Alla El-Awaisi, director of Clinical Operations and Communication at QU Health, described the meeting as an excellent opportunity to provide an interactive platform for students to experience the real IPE in order to prepare them as future health professionals.Jawaher Baraka, president of the IPE Student Association and a fifth year student at QU College of Medicine, said that the interprofessional education community is growing day by day.The keynote speaker, Prof Sandee Thompson (head, Department of English, Foundation Programme, UDST), shared her experience of surviving breast cancer twice and talked about the active breast cancer support network in Doha through the Dragon Boat Team for survivors and supporters.This was followed by the Healthcare Team Challenge, which involved four participating teams who presented cases and were then evaluated by faculty judges. The case was about an incidental finding of a patient with lung cancer while he was presenting with pneumonia. Each of the four teams had to collaborate among their members to come up with the best plan for managing the patient's emotional and psychological aspects during treatment. The case aimed to foster a collaborative spirit within the team rather than be of clinical significance only.In this challenge, students are randomly assigned to interprofessional teams that have an intersection between healthcare specialties to work together with other healthcare students, to develop the best treatment plan for the patient in the case. The goal of this challenge is to encourage collaboration and team spirit among participating students.The programme included presentations on health-related topics, which are essential components of the forum's agenda. Students in the healthcare profession delivered 13 presentations, each lasting 10 minutes, discussing various topics in the field of healthcare.