WMS In The Community
Rosie Rudin - Oddballs Ambassador
Second year student, Rosie Rudin is an Oddballs Foundation ambassador, which means alongside her studies she goes out and about in her recognisable Oddballs car to schools, sports teams and workplaces raising awareness of testicular cancer. Read more about her incredible work to raise awareness and funds for this important charity, and her role as a University Oddballs Foundation Ambassador here
Peer-led Basic Life Support
RMD Warwick is a peer-led Basic Life Support (BLS), Automatic External Defibrillator, and First Aid training course, set up in 2018 with the support of Birmingham Medical School.
Our European Resuscitation Council (ERC) endorsed medical student instructors have delivered CPR and First Aid courses to more than 150 of their medical and life science peers.
We attend local schools with both the Restart a Heart and West Midlands Care Team initiatives, raising bystander resuscitation awareness among staff and pupils. Our team also participated in a unique CPR/AED community teaching opportunity at the British Science Museum during their Science Museum Lates: Space event.
Despite the current challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are continuing our CPR research involvement, and preparing for next year’s teaching and community work as best we can.”
Carriers of Hope Charity
WMS have been working with Carriers of Hope, a local charity supporting asylum seekers, refugees and Eastern European migrants living within Coventry.
Our students and staff have collaborated with the charity to research the nutritional status of local refugees/asylum seekers and assessing the impact food banks can have on their health.
WMS students regularly organise and collect donations for the charity, including helping with the most recent "Christmas-Party-In-A-Bag" donation effort to distribute food, cards, and supermarket vouchers to more than 350 vulnerable families over Christmas.
Sexpression
Our Warwick branch of this charity does excellent work educating young people in and around Coventry on sex, health, and relationships.
WMS student Joanna Melville is currently National Director of the charity 'Sexpression'Link opens in a new window which facilitates near-peer inclusive Relationships and Sex Education across the UK.
She runs the charity day-to-day and has overseen lots of changes in her tenure. There are now 27 branches teaching thousands of young people annually, as well as advocacy and campaigning work.
Joanna has recently been awarded the Alumni Social Responsibility Medal by Manchester University for this work.
Bright Minds
Bright Minds is one of the projects set up by the WMS Paediatrics Society over the last year by Samir Sholapurkar along with some of the third year and second year students.
'The main idea is to get medical students at Warwick involved with young people across Coventry and Warwickshire through workshops, to talk about mental health. We aim to improve awareness of key mental health issues amongst young people and make sure that they know where they can access help and support should they or someone they know need it.
We are being supervised by one of the CAMHS consultants from the Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Partnership Trust; she has been fantastic in supporting us and getting things up and running.
We had our first event at a Seva School in Coventry, delivering our workshops to over 60 year 11 students. We focused on the topics of ‘Exam Stress’, ‘Self Harm and Coping Mechanisms’ and ‘The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health’, adding a bit of Mindfulness as well. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and we really felt we had an impact. We hope to resume our workshops and expand the project once the COVID-19 outbreak has settled down.'
PHEMTEC
Warwick Pre-Hospital, Emergency Medicine and Trauma Educational Conference (PHEMTEC) is an annual conference that enables healthcare students and junior professionals to explore the broad field of emergency medicine.
Founded by members of our 2016 cohort who were active in both the Wilderness Medicine Society and Trauma and Emergency Medicine Society, this joint venture set out to showcase the full spectrum of emergency care: From low-resource expeditionary medicine, to pre-hospital emergency medicine (PHEM), to fully equipped hospital-based resuscitation and critical-care.
The inaugural conference, PHEMTEC 2018, combined lectures, workshops and simulations to offer new and exciting learning opportunities to its delegates, which included talks from HEMS doctors, hands-on Ultrasound FAST scanning and live clinical anatomy for emergency procedures such as thoracotomies and front-of-neck airways.
See more here.
Portrait Project
MB ChB student Matt Thompson has been working on a portrait project at George Eliot Hospital photographing portraits of staff members in a variety of different roles across the hospital. As a photographer alongside his medical studies, he enjoys finding inspiring people whose story he can capture and share.
Matt has placed particular focus on those roles who have had to adapt, retrain or ramp up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as roles such as cleaners, laboratory or bereavement teams who all contribute to every patient’s outcome and journey through the hospital.