Patients Know Best platform helping to connect international students

The Patients Know Best platform (PKB) is being used to connect healthcare students from Newcastle University School of Medical Education with their counterparts in South East Asia.

The platform will enable students at Newcastle University School of Medical Education and its international branch campus, Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia (NUMed), to remotely practise their consultations skills, helping them gain confidence in their ability to collaborate with patients on their care.

First year students at Newcastle will use the PKB platform in ‘simulated model’. This means they will be able to view care plans, input medications and view test results of case studies of patients that have been created by module leads.

The opportunity is part of a cross-campus learning tool with NUMed Malaysia, which provides medical and biomedical degree programmes equivalent to the offering from Newcastle, but contextualised for Malaysia.

Dr Cathy Williamson, GP senior lecturer at Newcastle Medical School, said: “Our team has been creating simulated educational patient records for Year 1 medical students to access and become familiar with using as an adjunct to their studies.

“Soon we will begin reaching out to patients across our region to invite them to create their own educational patient record and enable future interaction with Year 2 medical students in an online digital environment using the PKB educational platform. We anticipate this will give students a great opportunity to meet patients and build new skills that will be essential for doctors in the future.”

In the future it is hoped that the Patients Know Best platform can be used between different schools and universities to support interprofessional learning, which helps to promote knowledge exchange and deliver a positive impact on patient outcomes.

PKB medical education lead, Olivia Kennedy, said: “We are proud to have the University of Newcastle as our latest education partner and are thrilled to be working with such varied groups of students as part of this work.”

When the Patients Know Best platform is deployed in February, Newcastle University will join existing education partners including the University of Manchester, the Medical School at Leicester University, the School of Pharmacy at Liverpool John Moores University and the School of Midwifery at City University.