Improving personal care
During this Community Engaged Learning (CEL) project students, partners and teachers worked together on improving personal care for glioma patients. Four students from the study Psychology were involved in this project and they were introduced to a patient diagnosed with a brain tumor, a spouse of a patient and a doctor working at the neuro-oncology department of the hospital. Worthful discussions amongst each other led to new perspectives and ideas for improving neuro-oncological care.
Background
This project was started to get Psychology students in contact with the working field earlier. Usually, students have their first internship during their master, in the bachelor they don’t have any contact with patients. This project was therefore specially designed for bachelor students. During this project different goals were formulated. First of all, the students wanted to learn more about neuro-oncological care and they wanted to learn from the perspectives of patient/spouse/doctor. The partner (patient, spouse, doctor) asked the students to collaborate in a project to improve personal care for patients diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Project description
The ideas for improving personal care emerged from discussions between students, partner and teacher. The project kicked off with a meeting to get to know each other and to discuss aspects of the care for brain tumor patients that could be improved. After that, the students had individual meetings with the patient, spouse and doctor, so that more specific information could be gathered. During the project the teacher had several meetings with the students to check the project’s progress.
Results
Based on the input from the partner, the students came up with different options to improve personal care. The students wrote a proposal in which different ideas were described. One of the ideas was a adding more personal information about a patient in the health care file so that doctors can adjust their interaction/communication with the patient based on patient’s personal preferences. The students formulated a list of personal questions that can be answered by the patients, and they discussed uploading photos and/or videos in the health care file. Some of the ideas the students presented can be used right away, others will need more time before they can be implemented in daily care because of juridical and organizational reasons.
Bringing together students and patients resulted in valuable experiences and ideas. It is likely that everyone involved in this project learned form each other and each others perspectives. Both more professional as more personal goals were achieved. There were also some challenges. CEL comes along with many degrees of freedom. This was sometimes hard for the students, they are not used to this kind of education. From a teacher perspective, the interaction with students was challenging, as it was difficult to create an equal relationship (one of the key factors of CEL). Students were struggling to see the teacher as a sparring partner, since this person would also be grading them. As a result, the interaction between me and the students remained more hierarchical than initially intended. The advice would be to give the students the freedom they need, but to also set a clear framework for them in which the project can be done. Furthermore, to spend a considerable amount of time at the beginning of the project explaining CEL and the equal relationships that are important within this type of education.
Reflections
You are free to share and adapt, if you give appropriate credit and use it non-commercially. More on