RESULTS: Five repatriation missions performed was led by the National Agency for Disaster Management (NADMA) with the Ministry of Health providing technical expertise. A total of 432 citizens were repatriated from the missions. The operations were divided into four phases: the pre-boarding screening phase, the boarding and in-flight phase, the reception phase and the quarantine phase. The commercial aircraft used were from two different commercial airlines. Each mission had flight crew members between 10 and 17 people. There were 82 positive cases detected among the repatriated citizens. There was a single positive case of a healthcare worker involved in the mission, based on the sample taken on arrival of the flight. There were no infections involving flight team members.
CONCLUSION: Medical flight crew must be familiar with aircraft fittings that differ from one commercial airline to another as it influences infection control practices. A clear understanding of socio-political situation of a country, transmission routes of a pathogen, disease presentation, and knowledge of aviation procedures, aircraft engineering and design is of great importance in preparing for such missions. Our approach of multidiscipline team involvement managed to allow us to provide and execute the operations successfully.
METHODS: The study consisted of two phases. In Phase 1, a 10-item instrument (SAIL-10) was developed and tested on a cohort of medical and pharmacy students who attended the workshop. In Phase 2, different cohorts of medical and pharmacy students completed SAIL-10 before and after participating in the workshop.
RESULTS: Factor analysis showed that SAIL-10 has two domains: "facilitators of interprofessional learning" and "acceptance to learning in groups". The overall SAIL-10 and the two domains have adequate internal consistency and stable reliability. The total score and scores for the two domains were significantly higher after students attended the prescribing skills workshop.
CONCLUSIONS: This study produced a valid and reliable instrument, SAIL-10 which was used to demonstrate that the prescribing skills workshop, where medical and pharmacy students were placed in an authentic context, was a promising activity to promote interprofessional learning among future healthcare professionals.
METHODS: A research proposal writing format was created for the 4th year medical students of Melaka Manipal Medical College, Malaysia during their ophthalmology clinical postings. The students worked in small groups and developed research protocols through an evidence based approach. This was followed by writing reflective summaries in academic portfolios about the activity undertaken. A mixed methods study was designed to explore the possible role of collaborative research proposal writing in enhancing critical thinking and collaborative learning.
RESULTS: Analysis of reflections submitted by 188 medical students after the intervention indicate that majority of them found an improvement in their skills of critical thinking and collaborative learning as a result of research protocol writing. All participants agreed that the model helped in applying concepts to new situations in the form of designing their own study, which reflected in enhanced higher order cognitive skills.
CONCLUSION: This study shows that the introduction of a structured module in the core medical curriculum that focuses on research writing skills embedded with collaborative and reflective practices can enhance collaborative learning, critical thinking, and reasoning among medical students.
METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted among year 1 to year 5 medical students in a private medical university. A self-administered questionnaire was used with the 3 major domains of professionalism and ethics i.e. discipline plagiarism and cheating.
RESULTS: A total of 464 respondents responded to the survey and they included medical students from year 1 and year 2 (pre-clinical) and years 3-5 (clinical years). Majority of the students, 275 (59.2%) answered that they had not seen any form of unethical behavior among other students. The females seem to have a larger number 172(63%) among the same gender compared to the males. Majority 352 (75%) of them had not heard of the 'Code of Professional Conduct by the Malaysian Medical Council'. About fifty three (53.1%) of the students answered that the training was sufficient.
CONCLUSIONS: This study showed that the perception of unethical behavior was 58.8% in the 1st year (pre-clinical) and it increased to 65.2% in the 5th year (clinical). The 3 main discipline issues were students do not show interest in class (mean 2.9/4), they are rude to other students (mean 2.8/4) and talking during class (mean 2.6/4). Despite the existence of unethical behavior among the students majority of them (71.7%) claimed that they had adequate training in ethics and professionalism. It is proposed that not only the teaching of ethics and professionalism be reviewed but an assessment strategy be introduced to strengthen the importance of professionalism and ethics.
METHODS: A 28-item instrument which comprised of 5 domains: diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, medications and general issues was designed and tested. One point was given for every correct answer, whilst zero was given for incorrect answers. Scores ranged from 0 to 28, which were then converted into percentage. This was administered to 77 patients with type 2 diabetes in a tertiary hospital, who were on medication(s) for diabetes and who could understand English (patient group), and to 40 pharmacists (professional group). The DHL knowledge instrument was administered again to the patient group after one month. Excluded were patients less than 18 years old.
RESULTS: Flesch reading ease was 60, which is satisfactory, while the mean difficulty factor(SD) was 0.74(0.21), indicating that DHL knowledge instrument was moderately easy. Internal consistency of the instrument was good, with Cronbach's α = 0.791. The test-retest scores showed no significant difference for 26 out of the 28 items, indicating that the questionnaire has achieved stable reliability. The overall mean(SD) knowledge scores was significantly different between the patient and professional groups [74.35(14.88) versus 93.84(6.47), p < 0.001]. This means that the DHL knowledge instrument could differentiate the knowledge levels of participants. The DHL knowledge instrument shows similar psychometric properties as other validated questionnaires.
CONCLUSIONS: The DHL knowledge instrument shows good promise to be adopted as an instrument for assessing diabetic patients' knowledge concerning their disease conditions and medications in Malaysia.