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Exchanges Sessions at the Americas Regional Meeting in Colombia
Erick Marcelo Torres González IFMSA - Mexico Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León nore.mexico@gmail.com
The Americas Regional Meeting has always been the perfect platform for us to empower youth and create regional collaboration across diverse health areas. Two of the core areas – and greatest challenges – of our Federation are the professional and research exchanges. During the exchange sessions at the Americas RM, we focused on capacity building and learning about available resources needed to create high quality exchange programs that could get recognized locally, nationally and regionally. We held trainings in many specific areas to improve exchanges. I personally got the opportunity to learn so many things. One of the topics discussed during the sessions was totally new for me: Global Health. I discovered how our exchange program goals are actually focused on providing not only high quality experience for the participating students but also on raising awareness about the difference between the local and national healthcare systems worldwide. Pre-exchange trainings for exchange students were discussed in detail, exploring actual problems and innovative solutions other National Member Organizations have used in the past. Improving
academic quality was also a main concern. Through different activities we got to brainstorm about all the possible ways for improvement, including more collaboration with the student, the tutor, and the institutions. In the Americas region, recognition of exchanges nationally and regionally has been difficult to achieve. Even though several of our NMOs have been working with exchanges, the differences between the medical programs have always been a barrier for official academic recognition. Therefore it’s really important that we, as students involved in the exchanges of our respective organizations, try and accomplish our goals, and do our best to improve quality and achieve recognition of exchanges. The best part of our meeting was the opportunity to meet all those motivated students actively involved and realizing that we are a new generation that has identified the sources of the current problems of our region – a generation ready to work towards excellence.
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medical students worldwide | AM 2015, Macedonia