Medical Imaging goes international with Ugandan workshop
Published on 08 December, 2011
CQUniversity's Medical Imaging students had their first opportunity to get involved with their profession from a global perspective, with an invitation to travel and work with academic Cynthia Cowling on a week-long workshop in Uganda.
Katrina Ryan, a first-year student, leapt at the chance and spent an amazing 10 days in a learning situation very different from Mackay.
LINK also for Nepal a life-changing experience for nursing students
Student Katrina Ryan with academic Cynthia Cowling and one of the Ugandan workshop participants
Cynthia, in her capacity as Director of Education of ISRRT (the International Society of Radiographers and Radiological Technologists), manages and occasionally attends workshops around the world.
This particular workshop was on Image Interpretation for Radiographers and attendees were all graduates of the three-year degree program offered in Uganda. They are also working practitioners in health facilities with few doctors and even fewer radiologists available and where they are frequently asked to provide opinions on the radiographs they take.
Katrina and Cynthia were fortunate to have with them Dr Ian Cowan, a radiologist from New Zealand, and Jenny Motto, Vice Dean of Health Sciences from The University of Johannesburg, who both proved to be a wealth of information.
Katrina enjoyed being on 'the other side' of learning, being asked to mark the anatomy pretests and assist students in the interactive sessions. Cynthia and Katrina both learnt much from the sessions themselves.
Cynthia and Katrina visit Murchison Falls on the Nile River
The key to the program was that radiographers looked at their images in a different way and were able to question why they took the images that were asked of them and what was considered normal and abnormal.
"The Ugandan students were totally committed to the workshop and stayed on long after the end of each day, full of questions. It was a great opportunity to interface with radiographers whose university program was not that dissimilar to ours but who had a very different clinical experience," Cynthia says.
"Katrina, who had never been outside of Australia, was confronted by the poverty and sheer craziness of Kampala but after a week working with the delightful participants and three days finding an amazing array of animals on treks and safaris, she now has Africa in her blood and this will hopefully be the start of a fruitful relationship with our Ugandan colleagues."
