Seminar overview:

This seminar aims to help Faculty colleagues who are planning a TDG project or who are just interested in medical education research. It will help provide insight into the design and thinking behind successful HKUMed TDG projects through the sharing by the following speakers:

TDG projects:

An Integrative Module for First-year Pharmacy Students: Increasing Clinical Exposure and Enhancing Professional Identity

Ms Jody Chu, Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy

The HKU Bachelor of Pharmacy Program has implemented a curricular revamp from the academic year of 2020/2021 to adopt an integrated curriculum. By incorporating foundational and clinical sciences in an integrated curriculum, proposed benefits include promotion of students’ motivation and professional identity development. To bring out the essence of an integrated curriculum, clinical exposure and theory-practice integration should be encouraged from year one, where usually only foundational sciences were being taught.

This TDG project focused on developing and implementing a Professional Development Programme (PDP) for year one pharmacy students as part of their orientation program. Through activities such as alumni sharing, introductory workshop on clinical cases, and taster session on pharmacy practice workshop and PBL etc. The module aimed to raise students’ appreciation of the diverse role of pharmacists and increase their professional identity as future pharmacists. Students were guided through in class group activities co-designed with senior student partners and continuous professional development log write up to encourage peer learning.

Students’ motivation to study and professional identity were evaluated using validated scales, focused group interview was conducted at the end of the Programme to collect student feedbacks on their experience. PDP has now been formally incorporated into the year one BPharm curriculum.

Online Peer Mentorship Programme under Covid-19 to Enhance Emotional Intelligence (EI) for Undergraduate Nursing Students Preparing Clinical Practicum

Dr Joanna Ko, School of Nursing

Emotional intelligence (EI) is crucial to nursing practice with a high occupational stress level¹. EI would help tackle high level of anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, sleep disturbances and burnout among nurses². EI also equips nursing students against challenges during clinical practicum. Particularly under Covid-19 pandemic, nursing students may have stress level increased during clinical practicum due to close contact with suspected and confirmed cases3. In spite of online teaching mode of university making a convenient access of resources for students such as clinical skill videos and virtual simulation mimicking different clinical circumstances, students still require emotional competence for their clinical practice.

In this project, we plan to develop an online peer mentorship programme and evaluate its effect to enhance students’ EI level to prepare them for clinical practicum. EI relies on interpersonal intelligence and interacting with social environment4. We experienced an optimistic effect towards EI brought by peer mentoring as nursing students could learn through imitation and modelling5. Therefore, we expect this project will be effective in enhancing participants’ EI level and optimizing their learning experience in clinical practicum.

The project aims to (1) develop an online peer mentorship programme for clinical practicum preparation among nursing undergraduates under covid-19 by establishing learning communities between senior and junior nursing undergraduates and promoting student-focused interactions and (2) evaluate the effect of peer mentorship towards EI among nursing undergraduates.

Augmented Reality Smart Glasses Technology for Immersive Learning in the Emergency Department (AGILE-1)

Dr Pui Kin Lam, Department of Emergency Medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional clinical teaching, depriving medical students of valuable clinical engagement with patients in the emergency department (ED). The current model of delivering teaching via livestreaming of resuscitation cases using an iPad requires two doctors for each small group session, and is not sustainable given the increasing class size.

The Microsoft HoloLens 2 is an augmented reality (AR) head-mounted device (HMD) which enables a single clinical teacher to facilitate real-time distant immersive learning by medical students on acutely-ill ED patients while insulating them from infection risks.

In this project, we aim to 1) develop an AR HMD prototype based on HoloLens for clinical teaching; and to 2) to evaluate the knowledge gain, student mental load, satisfaction, motivation and tolerability.

We propose a 1-year project with 2 phases. In phase 1, we will pilot test the AR system in clinical teaching in the ED of Queen Mary Hospital. In phase 2, we will conduct a randomised controlled trial to compare the impact of AR learning and livestreaming on student knowledge, satisfaction, motivation and adverse effects. This study will provide useful data to inform future application of AR technologies in other high-risk learning environments with restricted student access. 

Speakers:

Ms Jody Chu, Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy, HKU
Dr Joanna Ko, School of Nursing, HKU
Dr Rex Lam, Department of Emergency Medicine, HKU

Moderator:

Dr Fred Ganotice, BIMHSE, HKU