Gadjah Mada Medical Summer Course 2014!

Hello CIMSA! In this opportunity we will inform you about a project that is just recently done, which is the annual International Summer Course of CIMSA Universitas Gadjah Mada that is called GAMAMORSE or Gadjah Mada Medical Summer Course. It was held from 3-14 August 2014 with 14 participants came from many countries all over the world such as Netherlands, Slovenia, Austria, Japan, and Taiwan. The participants are not only medical students but also from nursing. In these 12 days of courses, the participants learned the knowledge and practical skills about a specific medical theme and also enjoy the wonderful culture and landmarks of Yogyakarta.

     This year theme is Infectious and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), a group of diseases that mostly affect developing, poor countries and marginalized communities and are widely neglected by medical centers and policy makers worldwide. However, more than 1 billion people get these diseases and NTDs can blind, deform and debilitate the victims resulting social stigma and preventing people to go to work or school, thus creating circle of poverty. These disease include mostly parasitic and bacterial infections. These are the reasons why we decided to bring this theme up this year, to open the eyes of students that will soon be a practitioner or policy makers in medical field to also focus on these diseases that probably won’t much found in their countries.

     In GAMAMORSE, the participants learned the basic knowledge on NTDs from Professional Lecturer from Faculty of Medicine Universitas Gadjah Mada, the leading medical faculty and tropical medicine education and research in Indonesia. And also other educational activities such as tutorial, practical session, visit to Puskesmas (Community Health Center), health services, and also counseling to elementary school in order to interact with the society and with the patients that most likely infected by NTDs.

     There were also a lot of social programs around Yogyakarta that we hope can introduce the culture and history of Indonesia especially Yogyakarta to the participants. From Borobudur, Prambanan, Goa Pindul until Live-in/Home Stay in Pentingsari Village and many more. Even though the schedule is quiet tight but the participants were really enjoy the programs and very grateful to visit Yogyakarta. Other than that, we as the committee also learned a lot about the cultures and history from the participants countries which make this program much more interesting.

     At last, we hope that this program can make a difference in the life of the participants, we hope that it can broaded their knowledge about NTDs and bring all the good things they learned back to their countries and share it with the others. Hopefully, this program and theme won’t end here and can continue to many years to come so the effect and differences will be much bigger. (Alvin Santoso Kalim)

NB: Sorry for the lateness of this article to be uploaded. There was a problem in the server that we couldn't get into the website. - admin.