As an educationalist and project manager working for Health Education England, I’m lucky enough to get to meet a huge range of people working in the healthcare service. However, the opportunity for us all here to interact immediately and creatively with such a diverse range of people is a specific and innovative one.
Hack Partners have carefully structured the event to ensure that the Friday night is spent quickly orientating people, getting them to interact, getting them to have fun, to socialise and then to quickly begin to work in teams. This happens astonishingly quickly and it’s fantastic to be able to learn so much, so quickly.
It’s been such fun already speaking to participants and mentors about why they are attending TELHack, what they want out of it, what they hope to put in and what the experience means in terms of learning for them. It’s clear that all see this as a real opportunity – an opportunity that isn’t, or hasn’t been, readily available. Everyone wants to create, wants to make a difference and everyone is here to learn, to create and to be inspired. The words frequently used are ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘awesome’. There are some hack veterans but there are also people here who are first-timers.
Lunch was spent chatting to Iona, a fourth-year medical student who put forward a great pitch which, unfortunately, didn’t get taken up. But, that’s the nature of hacks and the one thing that is overwhelmingly evident is that whilst there are no shortage of challenges in healthcare education, there is, equally, no shortage of ideas in attempting to solve them.
Check out Iona’s blog at flawsinscience.com