Contents: LC of Isfahan 2 More than just a doctor 3 Peer learning 4 Isfahan SCOPH report 5 Being a SCOPHian 7 Stay Connected 9 Enlarge your dreams 10 A letter from a member 11 IFMSA AM 2012 12 Nothing but everything 13
Our Orange Path Isfahan SCOPH Newsletter July 2012; Issue 1, Year 1 Contact: IFMSA-IRAN/Isfahan-SCOPH SCOPH.isf@gmail.com www.scoph-isf.ir Isfahan Standing Committee on Public Health – IRAN Medical Student’s Association International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations
Aidin Parnia; LPO of Isfahan (IFMSA-IRAN) Here we are, after a month, this is my first official report as LPO of my orange family. That’s a real honor to be the first but surely not the last Isfahan public health officer and it makes my responsibility even more when I’m working with my talented friends. For sure all we have done in the last month was just some small steps toward our long journey for higher aims but I hope that you can enjoy every scene during this journey and every single small goal we achieved. As I told you before there are lots of exciting, unbelievable learning situations and joyful times in SCOPH family and we still can make much more. Just remember to stay tight with your family, because that’s how it works. My last words to you, for now of course, enjoy what you do but consider doing it quickly, cleanly and precisely. Orange Days
Thanks to all my dear IFMSA-family at LC of Isfahan who worked hard to bring IFMSA to our university. On June 10th, 2012 these dedicated people held an Introduction session in which more than 80 students attended and LC of Isfahan officially started its work. Although there are more talented, dedicated, hard worker students at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences who we hope will join us soon. We, as a part of IFMSA-family at Isfahan will do our best to get more students involved and try to make LC of Isfahan a great opportunity for all.
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هچ صلح و هچ جنگ،آنجا هک عنایتست تس هچ بیح و هچ جنگ،ور کار نیکاست
هچ رومی و هچزنگ،گر مرد قبولاست تسلیم و رضا باید و هن سر و سنگ Where kindness is, who cares for peace or war?
Where goodness acts, who hears prayer or quarrel? When a man's accepted, who cares where he's from? Surrender, yield; if not, your pride's a stone. #1077, from Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi Translated by Zara Houshmand
http://www.iranian.com/A rts/rumi.html
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Naeimehossadat Hosseini Vice of LPO of Isfahan (IFMSA-IRAN) I started my internship 4 months ago. Have never been so much involved with the patients, have never felt so responsible. It is has been a huge step forward. About one month later, I was just a student, wandering between wards or better to say, simply passing by. Now, I am responsible for a patient. I am no more a bystander. And that makes me think about things happening around me. I have to take care of lives; people who are in need of help, take the pain away and reassure them. That I see as the best part of medicine. Helping people relieve. But there are times I ask myself why so much people seek medical care every day? What do we lack in between? Every year such big deal of money is spent on medications and para-clinics, what can we do to stop this vicious cycle?
Not so long ago, doctors were recognized as healers, if one got sick, he/she would seek a doctor to find a remedy for the pain. But things changed upon time. Treating the diseases were no more the priority but prevention. Why bother spending that much money on treating lung cancer when simply it could be prevented by warning people about the consequences of smoking? Why investigating so much money on treating people when a routine self-exam can have a tremendous role? In my country –like many other countries, many people call for a doctor when they are affected by a disease. Many people still believe doctors as healers. Here is a question I ask myself almost all the time, where do “I” stand? Am I just a healer? Or am I meant to be someone more than just a healer? I care, and that’s what makes me feel more responsible. How can I help? I found the satisfaction I was looking for in SCOPH. Being a SCOPian helped me to have a holistic view, to spend time on educating people rather than treating them. It won`t take much time, but it will have a great impact. Health is a gift many of us are honored with, but keeping it is not easy. Diseases are burdens, not only for the one affected, but for the whole society. For a healthy society, we, as soon to be doctors, can have a huge impact, if only we care.
Peer Learning Fereshte Tavakkoli Member of Isfahan SCOPH Nowadays, despite many achievements in science and technology, people are so busy that they don’t have time for learning different things through the books. In my opinion, in this situation, the best thing to do is teamwork. According or simply according to one`s experiences, we can suppose that he/she is a collection of different knowledge, behaviors, ideas and etc. So when we work together we can use others experiences and learn the positive aspects of each other. That’s so like reading the books written within people.
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How we make it work? For every young and new group or organization planning is a vital step. Although, planning and developing a map to reach goals is always important but when you start something new it needs precise plans. By the way, about a month ago we just decided to bring a branch of SCOPH family to Isfahan. Since then we have done all we could to make our small SCOPH family bigger, stronger and smarter. To do this, the search for information and setup need assessment was done by the LPO and his vice. With these results 4 main Goals were established to set up our new SCOPH family and a deadline was estimated for them. Title of these 4 setting up main goals was: 1. Creating the draft of Isfahan SCOPH internal constitute. 2. Publishing Isfahan SCOPH projects manual and guideline. 3. Creating Isfahan SCOPH recruitment and motivation plan. 4. Creating Isfahan SCOPH annual action plan for 2012-13. After understanding our goals we started to find out what resources we needed to reach them. Of course we needed more people to get involved. So we created organization chart for our family setup team. Through this chart 3 divisions and 1 executive board were defined. These 3 divisions which fit to our established goals are: - Project management division - Resource management division - Planning and development division
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Recruitment for Isfahan SCOPH setup team was made through 1 week and followed 2 major goals which were: 1. Bringing more experienced medical students together to increase the efficacy of setup team. 2. Involving less experienced medical students to establish peer learning situation and make them ready for further Isfahan SCOPH actions.
Isfahan SCOPH setup team invitations were sent for 32 medical students with about 70% response rate; 26 of responders were accepted and invited to attend the 1st Isfahan SCOPH official meeting.
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Maryam Fakhri Who wants to be a SCOPHian? Do you care about your family, society, country or every people in the world? If you don’t SCOPH has something for you! No surprise, SCOPH works great for people who care but it can show to people who don’t the importance of public health. At this time Isfahan SCOPH doesn’t accept new membership application. By the way the application form will be available for those who are interested but recruitment starts at the end of this summer.
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Planning and Development Officer of
Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN) When I was a kid I always thought that I should help people somehow in my future career which was assumed to be medicine most of the time. It took time to understand helping people as a physician is something beyond a childish dream of examining, smiling and prescribing kindly in an office. It took further years of studying in medical school to understand your greatest help to your people as a doctor is not to cure what they are suffering from. Experiencing medical school, I gradually understood if I care health problems encountering my people, or claim that I care, my debt is not paid even if I decide to visit patients for free! I wondered that people health problems had been increased as I was growing up or it was the matter of being in the arena, the matter of awareness!
The more we went ahead, the longer the way appeared and the more unobtainable the health targets seemed to be gained solely. You looked to be eligible enough to give your people a hand for having the least need of unnecessary visits and the highest level of necessary awareness and access to required health care. Passing every year, every semester, every exam and every patient you got nearer to experience the fact that what is known as health services actually belong to everyone, from the nearest towns to the farthest rural areas, and you wished you could make this notion true. It took some more time that I made sure there are many things that I, as a medical student, even as the eligible one, cannot do solely in such a long way. What about the childhood dream!? What about all notions and desires. It was just the time I made a wish just the same as yours. To have the power to show what can be changed by me maybe by having a chance to gather some people, some friends and some medical students of the same concern! What if your dream has been made true now?! What if SCOPH is that desired gathering and SCOPHians are those friends of yours having the concern of public health, just as yours. What if you have got the chance to be a member of SCOPH big family to make your power double and present it to the world! Today is your day. Your whole asset! Do you still think about our childhood dream? Do you think about the plan of tomorrow? Tomorrow will always be there, waiting for us to make the most of it. But we cannot make the most of tomorrow without first making the most of today! Just remember the dream and let’s join together…and join tomorrow…for making tomorrows … Under the orange flag of SCOPH
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Aidin Parnia; LPO of Isfahan (IFMSA-IRAN) That was long time ago that people dreamed about talking to each other from miles away. I don’t remember because I wasn’t born that time! But I remember how technology changed our life. Except my personal interest in mobile computer technologies there are some reasons why I insist on using new world simplest technologies to stay connected and use them to collaborate in our SCOPH-family. The first reason is we can use them for free! The second one is using the online social tools and teamwork solutions help us to get more time thorough our busy time and university schedule. So we found these online solutions best to do our job and have our individual timetables. Of course there are more reasons like archiving documents on the cloud or working on instant updated documents. For sure getting ready for the next technology revelation in future can be another reason. Anyway within Isfahan SCOPH-family we use these simple solutions even if my colleague lives 2 blocks away. We are looking at it like a practice for better performance on long distance collaboration. Just for example we use Google drive to share, archive and work together on documents and projects. This is not a big deal but keeps our cost near zero. This is not an Ad for Google services but I’ve found these services really useful for small working groups and small businesses.
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Maede Rajaeefar Member of Project management division of Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN) For most of us when starting medical school, studying turns into our first priority. Years and years we sit behind our desks and every day we become more distant from the society. We forget this important fact that the people we intend to cure in future are those around us. Being trained that way, is it possible to complete our duty as a doctor? Why imprisoning ourselves in care centers and limiting our role to that instead of promoting peoples health? The motive for establishing SCOPH was giving an answer to this question. By entering SCOPH, your field of vision will be switched from individuals to population. You seek to explore, analyze and get round the problems before they progress and become widespread. This is what “prevention is prior to treatment” means. On the other hand you have access to a community of medical students around the world who can share all their experiments, expertise, trainings and ideas with you. The aim is not only raising awareness of your society's issues, but also becoming familiar with other countries health difficulties and the manner of encountering them. These experiences can be more valuable than reading hundreds of books. The object is not limited to medical problems. Indeed health difficulties contain all health policies, transnational disagreements, deprivations and inequalities which you can struggle with, through the organizing and communication skills you learn in SCOPH. That’s how you become a better healthcare professional.
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Sadegh Baradaran Mahdavi Member of Project management division of Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN) My dear SCOPHian partners In this handwriting I’m going to tell you a little about “Health” and in better word “Public Health”. I’m sure that you know all about this but I’m here just to emphasize some parts which to me, sounds important. Since we were born, Health has been one of our most important issues and has affected many aspects of our lives such as our work and our life style. Remembering how it felt in your childhood during a severe cold or terrible flu helps you to understand how a little infectious disease can disturb your daily tasks and cause disability and create inappropriate feelings. So definitely that time you didn’t have any other choice, rather trying to tolerate it and hoping for the treatment to work. Did you? In addition, nobody wants to get sick and almost everybody hates diseases and being ill. But this favorite doesn’t deny the fact that there are many acute, severe, dangerous or simple diseases all around the world. Our today’s health can easily change to an unwanted status which doesn’t accommodate with our desires necessarily. As future doctors and also as SCOPHians, we are responsible for public and professional health care in the community. I believe that we are going to be lucky in our profession if we consider the role of public health among the healthy individuals and make ourselves ready to learn and then educate people. I want to say that public health can modify the behaviors and that’s a very important goal. All of us know that doing half an hour exercise a day will protect us against many chronic and long term diseases in the future. But how many percent of doctors –and not ordinary individuals, follow this guide them self?
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Here are some tips to develop our points of view about everything that is important, when we talk and think about Health as SCOPHians: We should update our knowledge and skills. It isn’t achievable simply by passing our obligatory courses and boring repeated lessons. We should motivate ourselves with getting involved with the process of conducting research to find scientific articles. We should share our experience and skills with each other any time we find them useful for our partners. If we want to do something beneficial in future, we should begin from ourselves. Orange wishes
Felora Ferdosi LPO Assistant on Project management Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN) Now it comes to GA. It stands for General Assembly which is a biannual meeting held in a different country every time. In this meeting IFMSA officials from all over the world gather and are involved in different trainings, evaluation and planning programs. 61st GA is going to happen in India. I really feel lucky to attend this meeting as a SCHOPH agent. Since we are a new-born committee we have a long way to go. My main achievement will be making new contacts through talking to other country’s authorities, introducing our committee, high potential city, country, people and expressing our desire to communicate and cooperate in different fields. I will also try to get more information about projects, how they manage them and their financial policies. I hope I can effectively discuss the matters of our federation and help our committee grow to some extents.
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Bahare Nasr Member of Resource management division of Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN) We’ve all heard the word "brain storming". Brain storming is a tool used by teams to bring out the ideas of each individual and present them in an orderly fashion to the rest of the team. The key ingredient is to provide an environment free of criticism for a creative and unrestricted exploration of options and solutions. I think we should use this method in our committee for more advance. For acting more with better result we have to know more about our people, society and its needs and accord our goals with it. It’s ok to use other SCOPH’s project but we should have in mind that our people’s needs, our culture and our facilities are different from other countries. For knowing more about our people and their needs, following steps are recommended: - Getting information from faculty of health. - Asking for consult from public health providers. - Getting information and also help from national, regional and international health and public health organizations. As we are acting as a local committee we should alter our goals to deprived and poor areas of Isfahan province. There are many impassable areas in which people are not even familiar with basics of being healthy. Last but not least, I think we should remember that we are working for public health and as the definition of public health we should dedicate ourselves for people. “It is health that brings us all together”.
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Imprint Editors in Chief Naeimehossadat Hosseini
Content Editors Aidin Parnia Maryam Fakhri Layout / Design Aidin Parnia
Authors Aidin Parnia Naeimehossadat Hosseini Maryam Fakhri Felora Ferdosi Fereshte Tavakkoli Maede Rajaeefar Sadegh Baradaran Bahare Nasr Niloufar Razavi
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