India

“What I learned through the PRIME educational resources helped me to understand the difference between ethics - how you should behave - and values - why you should behave. This understanding about value-based education as part of medical education has been a paradigm shift in my view of being a medical educator.” Medical Educator, India

Plans continue to develop for the ICMDA World Congress 2018 taking place in Hyderabad. PRIME will be a participant in the teaching programme and running a pro-conference programme. We already have several confirmed bookings for the PRIME teaching including colleagues from Portugal. Mozambique and Brazil. 

PRIME tutors continue to be involved in the contact phases of the Christian Medical College Vellore MMed Family Medicine programme coordinated by our colleagues at PRIME Australia. The programme now takes place in eleven locations across the country and is now being co-led by local facilitators who have previously undertaken the programme themselves. We anticipate this programme will become self-sufficient in due course as the local facilitators develop further. This course represents a unique opportunity for government doctors who have no access to postgraduate education, to do a course equivalent to other specialties. Also it is an opportunity for them to update their knowledge and skills right at their doorstep. Their 'refer less, resolve more' initiative aims to help them gain confidence and competency to handle most patients by themselves. The first advertisement of the course for family medicine drew about 500 applications and it was very clear that this was a felt need amongst the General practitioners. Future development opportunities: As applications kept pouring in from abroad, the Diploma programme has been opened up for enrolling students from African countries, Bangladesh and the Middle East. As the students have to come to India three times during the contact programs, collaboration is being worked out with African countries to start a contact centre there for the students to be trained. 

Two tutors are assisting our Indian colleagues with the development of the programme to include more whole person medicine elements and we are steadily training up local educators to make this programme self-sustainable. This is a fantastic opportunity for PRIME to work with local colleagues to develop Family Medicine in a context that has national implications for the development of the speciality in India.

Indian and British PRIME tutors have delivered palliative care training in seven locations in South India. The audiences were nurses, doctors, students and the Indian Society of Anaesthesiologists in government, private and mission hospitals. A US-based medical education NGO is hoping use the PRIME Palliative Care Workbook to support a new training programme for hospice and palliative care personnel in South India.

The partnership with EMFI (Evangelical Medical Fellowship of India) continues. We now have a PRIME champion in India, and a small team of tutors has been identified who will take forward the vision there. Sessions on whole person care using PRIME materials have been run at a number of EMFI conferences.