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The ICHAMS conference ‘a well rounded experience’

August 15, 2014

Winners of the Student Project of the Year 2013, from the RCSI, for its ‘International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students (ICHAMS) (l-r): Nikita Rane; Daniel Creegan; Layveeniea Anathan; Rebecca Horgan;
Jeffrey Nafash; May-Anh Nguyen; Dr Sarah O’Neill; Prof Hannah McGee; Young Hwa Soon; Sami Buckley and Vincent Healy

Lloyd Mudiwa gives a sneak preview of what participants can expect at this year’s RCSI’s International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students, Winner of the Student Project of the Year category in last year’s Irish Healthcare Awards.

Spurred on by the success of the Winner of the Student Project of the Year for 2013, this year’s organisers of the RCSI’s International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students (ICHAMS), are looking to have not only a bigger, but also more rounded conference for 2014.

The ICHAMS is an undergraduate biomedical conference, aimed at students and run by students, that gives undergraduates an insight into the translation of research from bench to bedside.

Strong foundation
The inaugural conference took place in 2011 at the RCSI, where more than 160 undergraduate students from 55 universities in 25 countries — including the United Kingdom, North America, Europe, Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, the Ivory Coast, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates —attended, hearing presentations from some 100 students.

Now an annual event — with this year’s conference scheduled to be held on October 24 and 25 — the meeting not only gives students the opportunity to present their research findings in an international setting and have their abstracts published, but also educates them on the general importance of research in the broader medical fields and provides career information on specific research topics they might want to pursue, both at home and abroad.

Well rounded
This year’s ICHAMS Co-Chair Jeffrey Nafash, MPH, a Candidate for Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and Bachelor of Obstetrics, currently in the Graduate Entry Program Year 3 with the RCSI School of Medicine, told IMT: “Building on a strong foundation set by our predecessors, ICHAMS 2014 is expanding our vision into new medical areas such as cyberpsychology and interventional neuroradiology, while retaining the core tenets of medical research.”

“This year we are integrating with the Schools of Pharmacy and Physiotherapy at the RCSI to deliver a more well rounded and multidisciplinary conference,” he added.

Nafash said the RCSI hoped to see an increase this year in the number of overall abstract submissions, not only from the medical community, but also from other health science schools.

“By planning interactive workshops, fostering partnerships with other organisations and highlighting our esteemed keynote speakers, we hope to attract delegates from all over the world,” he said.

Keynote speakers
The keynote speakers are Ms Mary Aiken, a CyberPsychologist and Research Fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons Institute of Leadership, whose doctoral research at RCSI focuses on Cyber Behavioural Analysis, and Dr Kieran Murphy, Vice Chair and Director of Research and Professor of Neurointerventional Radiology in the Department of Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto, a RCSI alumni who has filed 60 patents on new medical devices, pioneering new routes, techniques and approaches to complex spine and neurovascular and CSF pathologies.

Nafash said: “We can confirm that students will be travelling from all over the world to attend, including Russia, USA, Serbia, and the Middle East.

“We offer interactive workshops for participants, which this year will include: Gait-Analysis with the School of Physiotherapy at RCSI, A Guide through Anatomy at RCSI with Prof Clive Lee, and a Journal Club Bootcamp hosted by the RCSI Student Medical Journal.”

Detailed descriptions of the keynote speakers, conference schedule, and partner organisations can be found on the ICHAMS website: ichams.org. A few details for the conference are still in the works, and have not been updated on the website as of yet.

Stakeholder-centred approach
At last year’s Awards, other category winners were Dr Rosie Gowran a Lecturer in Occupational Therapy at the University of Limerick — Clinical Research Associate of the Year — for her novel stakeholder-centred approach to developing support services for people with epidermolysis bullosa (EB); and The Irish Primary Care Research Network (IPRCN), the Best Education Project — General Practice/Pharmacy category, for its creation of a national audit and analytics platform for primary care.

Dr Gowran’s research on EB focused on identifying the strengths and weaknesses in current services, facilitating a shared understanding among all stakeholders of the challenges in delivering those services, and highlighting possible avenues for future improvements for those with this rare skin condition.

Working closely with DEBRA Ireland, Dr Gowran’s interviews with stakeholders and her national survey of people living with EB revealed shortfalls in the provision of dressings and bandages, inadequate community services, and problems resulting from high levels of staff turnover and employment embargos.

A greater awareness about this rare genetic condition, where the layers of the skin are not properly attached to each other, is also needed, as is the need to prioritise education, training and research.

Research network
Ireland’s largest primary care research network, IPRCN, integrates the vast amount of data from primary care in a secure, scalable analytics platform that can facilitate real-time uploading, analysis and reports of anonymised data from GPs nationwide, with individual practice reports indicating how GPs’ quality indicators, demographics and prescribing habits, for example, compare to the national average.

Since January, some 475 practices have signed up to the scheme, with more than 200 having already uploaded anonymised data on more than 125,000 patients, on such topics as diabetes, safe prescribing, maternity care, atrial fibrillation and heart failure. A public version using Google Graphs has also been created.

Commendations
The first commendation in Best Education Project — General Practice/Pharmacy category went to the ICGP’s CPD Sessions & Clinical MedEd for their ‘Respiratory medicine training development’ programme, which blended online e-learning, live practical workshops and online assessment to deliver respiratory medicine training to GPs in a new, successful format that the College hopes will form a template for future ICGP courses.

The second commendation went to Kinsale Community Response to Dementia (K-CoRD) for the ‘K-CoRD project’, an integrated, community-based collaboration between GPs, primary care team members, carers and patients with dementia, with the aim of enabling those with dementia to have the choice of living at home for as long as possible and with a better quality of life — in short, to make Kinsale a dementia-friendly community.