e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

uae medical students vision

I have recently been embarrassed.

I received an email from the undergraduate office at Manchester University asking if I could provide information for a student who wishes to do her elective in KSA. Previously, I had the assumption that in the year of 2004, everything can be found online. A few hours on the net, however, revealed that it is of no use and I had to contact the organisers of the recent GCC medical conference in Al-Ain to get a list of contacts in KSA, which I passed on to the undergraduates? office.

Then curiosity grew in my mind. What if it is UAE that they were interested in? Would I have been able to find the required information on the net? Surely, we have all that is needed and there is no excuse for such inadequacy. I went on a quest to find all that the UAE medical community offers online and what image we project outwards. I was, embarrassed and disappointed.

How many times did we pride ourselves of being a family-like community; who stand by and support each other, work hand in hand to advance our peers and ourselves. In small segregated groups, or indeed individually, we cannot achieve much. There is potential on the Internet that we cannot individually pursue. ?Together? is a key word.

Increasingly I notice that medical students from UAE are being more competitive even on the Internet. Our efforts either antagonize each other or are too individual to grow bigger. Each of us is trying to pursue the online potential in his/her own way. In my personal opinion, this is not the best way to get about things.

There are medical students from UAE in different universities in UAE and around the world; Al-Ain Medical School, Ajman Gulf Medical College, Lootah Medical School, Dublin, Cork, Manchester, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and many other various colleges in UK, University of Toronto and Mc Gill University in Canada and elsewhere all have smart medical students from UAE. What have we accomplished together? Nothing.

Note here that I am talking about accomplishments on the Internet and not much else, since this is the field of experience for me.

There are attempts by some students to launch online websites (notice: websites, rather than resources and activities) but these don?t seem to be always productive, in a broad sense. Probably the largest of these websites is the modest Al-Ain Medical Student?s Website. Although I think the efforts spent on it are great and people working on it are trying their best, it is nowhere near what we, as UAE medical students should project outwards. The other popular one (in the modest use of the word), is the Dublin medical students website, which, lets face it, is only a chat room. There have been attempts by GMC students to launch yet their own website, but that did not seem to lift off the ground.

Now, why can’t we all get together, launch a proper online portal for all of us; a real general common shared place - where all our efforts are pooled together and where we can have more useful exchange of ideas and organize resources and activities that are most needed in our country.

Such a website, I think, should essentially include amongst other things:
-Discussion boards.
-News/events updates
-A revision section
-Electives databases
-Patients? information
-Practice cases (perhaps by hospital doctors)
-A section for the those interested in coming to uae to learn
-Online doctors? magazines
-Bursaries? opportunities in UAE
-Event sponsorships
-Messages from hospital deans, teaching staff and leading medical figures
-A section to post your papers online to share with the other medical students
-Online textbooks.
-guidelines to practice medicine in UAE.
-Contact database to trace all uae medical students all over the world.

To do this, all of us need to leave differences aside, stop trying to compete with each other, and administrators of individual websites should start to complement each rather than to hold on to their posts in the same manner a politician will hold on to his/her position. I, for one, am happy to divert all my medical traffic exclusively toward such a portal and will not save an effort to see that it thrives as part of a team that will pursue such a task.

We should build a common place for all of us, call it doctors.net.ae (or something of that sort) and share its management amongst a number of web oriented people, or even rotates between them. And then focus our efforts to getting all students to take part in advancing it by enriching its contents and participating in projects and discussions that take place. There is a lot to be done, and there is no one else to do it - it is just us.

Lets work together so that none of us is ever embarrassed in a similar way in the future.

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