My SPP and OSPIA initiatives are intimately linked to a thriving UNSW Medicine-community relationship, which I have built up over a decade or more. On this success, during those years, the SPP has been highly commended in UNSW Awards for Excellence in Community Engagement and twice been shortlisted for an Australian Financial Review Higher Education Award for Community Engagement. In addition, OSPIA has won the Faculty Award for Educational Innovation.
Both components of the SPP deliver academic excellence by individualising and personalising the student experience, in keeping with the UNSW Impact Pathways: 1. Through accessible education, empower current and future generations, and 5. Develop inspiring and cutting-edge environments and
simple, effective and trust-based systems. In addition, by engaging with our local and wider communities and involving community members in order to reflect the diversity that exists within our community (3. Convene across sectors and build networks locally and globally) and through the research conducted on SPP outcomes (2. Through research, lead knowledge creation, innovation and translation) this initiative manifestly addresses the UNSW Focus Area: Enable healthy lives.
By being exposed to people of differing ages and backgrounds with authentic symptoms and medical histories, students are highly engaged in Clinical Skills sessions and approach them in a professional manner. The SPP and OSPIA provide important teaching opportunities to junior students regarding participants’ varying views and expectations of the health system and in particular community member expectations of (future) doctors, which vary dependent according to demographic, cultural, ethnic and other factors. Learning this directly from our volunteers is something that medical students greatly value and are rarely exposed to in other settings.
The educational output of the SPP is our bespoke, evidence-based assessment, the Student-Patient Observed Communication Assessment (SOCA), of which many thousands have been conducted over the years.
