IMU Medical Students Gain Communication Skills at Interactive Workshop

The Clinical Skills Department, at IMU Bukit Jalil organised a workshop for the IMU Year 1 and 2 current medical students on 1 October 2022 with the focus of the workshop on improving the students’ competencies in communication skills. The topics were very well received by the students whose numbers had to be capped at 200 due to the overwhelming response. The topics covered at the workshop included some challenging communication skills such as sexual history, follow up history, language and communication skills, dealing with difficult patients as well as empathy and sympathy.

The idea for the workshop was brainstormed among the Clinical Skills Faculty. The plan was initiated by A/Prof Dr Jagmohni Kaur Sidhu (in the photo above), who could understand the shortcomings faced by students when communicating with patients due to her immense clinical skills experience and knowledge in teaching medical students. This resulted in the workshop, which was conducted by a team of 5 enthusiastic faculty members from the Clinical Skills Department.

The team members involved in this workshop were Dr Shilpa Murthy, Dr Sunila Rolani Sirisinghe, Dr Hazlina Abu Bakar and Dr Cheah Xian-Yang. A Semester 5 class representative, Samuel Chau Jun Hao, assisted with the registration. Our sincere gratitude also goes to Santha Kumari from Academic Services, Shahril from FMA and Mohd Rizal from IT Department of IMU for assisting us at the workshop.

The workshop started with an ice breaking session through virtual gaming sequence as the importance of proper communication and teamwork is the key to any success of any task.

The participating students, ranging from Semesters 2 to 5 students, showed great enthusiasm for the workshop, especially the Kahoot session on sexual history learning. The first three winners were awarded vouchers from Mad Alchemy. They were “M”, “Yushi” and “Nasi Arab Mandi”. Feedback from students included positive comments such as “this is a subject-oriented important topic discussion” and “Lot of doubts were cleared about communication skills especially during OSCE with time constraints”.

In future Clinical Skills Department hopes to organise OSCE training for students of Dentistry, Chinese Medicine, Pharmacy and other programmes. The faculty is also happy to share their expertise for training of examiners internal and external for OCSEs to other departments and universities.