THE first Health Care Team Challenge took place recently at the Melaka-Manipal Medical College (MMMC) as one of the events during ICON-IPEPC (International Conference on interprofessional Education, Practice & Care).
The Health Care Team Challenge (HCTC) is a competition-based learning method, during which the students from different health professions collaborate in teams to solve a complex health issue.
It was first introduced by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 1989 and has since been an annual event in Canada, US, Australia and Japan. In Malaysia, HCTC was first conducted within Monash University Malaysia in 2017.
This year in conjunction with the ICON IPEPC 2018, organised by MMMC, the event has been organised as a national level HCTC
Thirty students from five universities participated in this inaugural event, where five teams, each consisting of one dental, dietetic, medical, nursing and pharmacy student worked together to produce an interprofessional care plan for a patient suffering from heart attack, irregular heart rhythm and kidney disease.
“At the beginning I was reluctant to participate because I thought that it was not useful to me as a dental student. But this event opened my eyes, there are a lot of things I can learn from other professions,” said Royle, a dental student from MMMC.
“During the placements in the hospital, nurses are often just directed by doctors, but in this HCTC my views were being listened to. For me, this is the kind of collaboration I want,” said Nazrul, a nursing student from the International Medical College (IMC).
While Nursyafiqah, a dietetic student from the International Medical University said she learned a lot from other students, for example she said that she never knew that enoxaparin, prescribed for the patient, had porcine origin and thus consent was needed for Muslim patients.
Similar opinions were also described by Goh Kim Ling, a medical student from Monash.
“For me, I learned a lot from the nursing student in my team. I never realised that nursing students have such a good clinical knowledge,” said Brian Chong, a pharmacy student from Monash.
“The HCTC is a tremendous way of learning. I am glad that the students looked so engaged. I congratulate the organisers and the students for making this a successful event,” said Prof John Gilbert, a WHO expert on Interprofessional Education (IPE) who was also a keynote speaker at the conference.
