Queen's GP Society is run by an enthusiastic group of undergraduate medical students, aiming to encourage General Practice as a diverse career pathway. We talk to Society President and final year medical student, Tim Neill, about their incredible work, and how ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ has enabled them to make a global impact.
We'd love to know more about Queen’s GP Society, how does it run?
Three years ago when I joined, we had a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer who acted as an executive committee. This year we've expanded, and we now have two vice presidents. We've also added in a social media officer and two event admin officers who are responsible for the structuring, scheduling and production of our ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ events.
Tell us, what was life like before ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ?
We were primarily holding face to face events on a monthly basis and would have used Google Forms and Eventbrite for registrations, which was a lot of manual work as we had to collate and pull information from those tools.
What was the catalyst for exploring other platforms?
As everybody experienced, we had massive changes over Covid. As a Society we still wanted to produce good quality educational content and hold regular events. We wanted to promote General Practice, which got tough treatment in the media with issues that had been precipitated by Covid, so we started running our events online.
We're interested to know, why did you start using ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ?
We started off using Zoom. We had to do registrations via Google or Microsoft Forms, send out an email invite to each registered participant, and then another email asking for pre-submitted questions. We then had to distribute this information to our speakers and our presenters, and only after that could we actually look at getting the event up and running.
ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ had been floated as something for us to trial. We had a call with the team who talked us through the features and the penny dropped. We embraced it with open arms. Ever since then we've seen the developments and fantastic additions to the software that have made our life so much easier.
How do you find introducing ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ to your community?
A lot of the medical education departments in our local hospitals are using ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and have a ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ account set up. At an event we ran recently, one of our speakers had never heard of ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, we were able to reassure them that our settings only allowed registered and verified delegates to attend that event. This then gave them confidence to speak openly and honestly at the event, and know that their presentation wasn’t going to be misunderstood.
What do you find most useful about ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ?
GP is a multidisciplinary specialty. Through ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, we've been able to gather data on who's turning up to our events, where they work and what their healthcare discipline is. It's been really interesting to see who is attending our events as we’ve had midwifery students, nursing students, pharmacists, social workers and many more. It’s really encouraging for us that our ethos is being fulfilled in this way.
Through running virtual and hybrid events, students can come into a lecture theatre together or tune in from a hospital a couple of thousand miles away. I definitely feel more confident to run this style of event and that is because of the support that's available on ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ.
Lastly, what’s your proudest moment as President?
My proudest moment was the recent event. Almost 500 people from across Northern Ireland, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Europe, and the world registered for that event. ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ demographics are great for tracking, as I could see where people were registering from, and we had delegates joining us from Canada, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine. It was a great feeling to know that students were able to tune in from right across the world and to hear what our little Northern Irish based Society had to say about the SJT. Seeing that amount of people coming to an event that we organised, from across the world, showed us that we were breaking down barriers. This wouldn't have been possible without ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, as we couldn't have promoted what we were doing to a global audience.
