Workshop

Last weekend, I was one of the volunteers to help out in the Global Health Conference attended by about 400 medical students from all over the UK. My personal highlight of the weekend was the workshop that I delivered.

Conducting a workshop is nothing new to me. I have, since my second year in medicine, been leading various workshops on training of generic skills like leadership, publicity, teamwork in medical student conferences; on teaching when I coordinated the after school club; on asylum seekers issues all the time since I'm too passionate about this; global health issues like the one on maternal and child health which I did at the start of term this year. I love workshops, right from the planning to the execution. The fact that it's meant to educational, fun and stimulating through learning by participation makes the design and planning so interesting. I usually start by getting my team to research around the topic, then pool our findings and see how we can fit the important bits in our workshop. Then comes my favourite part, which is putting our creative mind to the test and come up with ideas on how the message can be delivered, be it open discussion, debate, brain storming, games or puzzles. Ideally we aim to get the participants exercising both their bodies and their brains. Meticulous planning is necessary and time keeping is essential as people tend to become so engaged that they want to carry on talking and playing for longer than the allocated time.

This workshop is called 'In the Shoes of the Asylum Seekers'. It involves role play and participants acting as either asylum seeker or health care professional or ordinary English people. Every scenario is followed by discussion of issues that have come up during the act. The fact that two of my friends were able to help me out in facilitating the small group activities meant that the groups were kept small and every single participant were able to speak up. It went very well overall. Participants were engaged, and we received nice positive feedback. It was worth all my effort planning the workshop while juggling with the extremely hectic paediatrics placement and neglecting my exam happening next week. I'm too very happy!