Source: www.mededworld.org/reflections/reflection-items/March-2016/HARDEN-S-BLOG-Medical-Education-and-Pandas.aspx
By Ronald M Harden

Summary:
In this blog, Professor Harden gives us an insight of his latest events and activities including a trip to China and United Arab Emirates.

Description:


East Meets West in Medical Education was the theme for a one day conference in Guangzhou, China on the 5th March.  Along with Trevor Gibbs, I was a guest speaker.  About 360 representatives from schools around China participated and I was impressed by the level of questions and interactions.  There is clearly growing interest in medical education in the country.  The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, who were hosting the conference, offer a rich clinical experience for their students with 20,000 outpatients each day attending the hospital.  There is also an impressive simulation suite including a simulated operating theatre and an OSCE suite with 14 rooms each linked with video cameras to a central point.  There are currently 1,565 doctors in the hospital and the aim is to offer as many as possible training in medical education.  As noted in the photograph the mission of the medical school is ‘we save human lives by studying them.’

Trevor Gibbs ran an ESME course for 50 staff in 2015.  The quality of the personal assignments was very high and they showed how they could apply the principles addressed in the course to their day to day practice as teachers.  A prize of travel and registration for the AMEE 2016 conference in Barcelona was given to the most impressive report from Dr Xuan Ho.  A further group of 50 teachers will be completing the ESME course this year. 


Professor Haipeng Xiao who is Professor of Medicine and President of the First Affiliated Hospital is committed to faculty development and to acknowledging teachers.  On a wall of the building are pictures of teachers who had been recognised for the quality of their teaching.  With my former clinical responsibilities being in thyroid disease, I was interested that this was also the clinical speciality of Professor Xiao.  I was intrigued by his use of thyroid arterial embolization to treat resistant Graves disease.  I also met Huang Yingzi who is the AMEE Ambassador in China and who has supported Trevor Gibbs on the ESME course.  While in Guangzhou we visited the Safari Park with the highlight seeing at close quarters the triplet pandas who are now 18 months old.  The zoo have clearly been more successful with their breeding programme than Edinburgh Zoo!  Among the animals are more than 200 tigers, also a tribute to their breeding programme.
...