the brand new dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Silvia Ávila, He pointed out that one of the priorities will be to work hard on undergraduate and postgraduate training and the need for human resources. “We are a group that defines ourselves as restless teachers who want to lead an entire renewal in the development of the faculty that has a lot of potential to solve the health problem,” she explained in an interview with LMNeuquén.
Ávila, who became the first elected dean at the school, is a pediatrician and geneticist. “I always went through the public education system and I never left the university,” she said. She received at the National University of Tucumán in 1989, she arrived in the province of Neuquén in 1993.
“When I arrived, it coincided that the race for Medicine and it was a dream to be able to continue with teacher training. I had an intervention in the plan study of the degree and to start doing teacher training before the degree was opened”, he recalled.
In what situation is the Faculty of Medical Sciences?
The faculty is about to turn 25, which represents a very young academic unit and therefore is in a growth crisis. Much has been done but much remains to be done.
What are the main goals you want to pursue as dean?
One of the objectives is to recover our graduates in the sense of offering them an attractive proposal for postgraduate development, so that they maintain contact with the academic unit and gradually join as teachers. We have graduates who are in different parts of the world, the province and the country, and we have the human resource crisis in both the private and public spheres. We passed a first challenge that was to have well-trained graduates, now the challenge is for these graduates to start working for a practical integration in the health system. On the other hand, we have a development of basic research that is consolidated but there is still a need to develop research in the area of social sciences. Medicine is not biology.
Do you think that a review of the career study plan is necessary?
Yes, through these years diagnoses were made about the difficulties that the study plan presents.
What are those diagnoses?
Medicine has a study plan of seven years which is already long. At the same time, the average graduation rate occurs between the ages of 10 and 12, and it has been detected where the arrest of the course occurs, which is between the first and second year, and between the fourth and fifth year. There is a major change between middle school and college. For this, a system of peer tutors was implemented to monitor the academic trajectory of this group of students. Then there is a change from that introductory cycle to the biomedical cycle and there is another stoppage, so what is scheduled for one year is done in two or three years. We have to act on that. You have to review the study plans so that the contents are really important. We know that the medical student who dedicated himself to nothing more than studying practically no longer exists, everyone has a degree of work activity that is more or less informal or formal. We cannot change the socioeconomic reality of the country, but we can accompany the trajectory, mark the relevance of the contents. When we say change we refer to changing the structure and the more pedagogical issues.
“It is necessary to reduce the hours of attendance of theoretical contents, not the subjects, and focus them on practical activities that can be developed in a more flexible way”, commented the dean.
In terms of content, where do you think the focus should be?
Today the career has to focus more on the analysis and acquisition of information rather than on aspects that are more rote. It is necessary to reduce the hours of attendance of theoretical contents, not the subjects, and focus them on practical activities that can be developed in a more flexible way. There are horizontal correlations that we have to remove from the study plan and probably subjects that are annual, make them four-monthly and dictate them in two four-month periods.
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In her assumption as dean, she pointed out that the faculty has a lot of potential to collaborate with the health system, how will that potential be used?
One of the aspects is the training time of a specialized professional. A medical graduate graduates in 7 or 8 years, then has four years of residency to be, for example, a pediatrician; that is to say, they are 12 years, which in the life of a young person is a lot. And if he chooses a second specialty, it’s four more years. The challenge is how we optimize those times. What should be done is to articulate well the training of the degree professional in a time that is optimal. That is why I am talking about revising the study plan, how we can help these students to dedicate themselves to studying and not have to resort to work activities that take time away from studying, how we create protected vacancies for residences or articulate the year rotating internship the last year they have with first year of residence. This represents an interaction between the university’s undergraduate trainer and the health systems that train specialists. We have proposals, we will see how the health systems react. We cannot continue to offer the same training tools as 20 years ago.
A few days ago the creation of a university hospital in Cipolletti was announced. What is your opinion?
It is an agreement signed by the outgoing management and that we are going to accompany. The initiative consists in developing practical activities for the students in the hospital. The Cipolletti hospital is an important training center. take the Cipolletti hospital as the axis to develop not only the student activity that is already done, but also postgraduate and extension activities for the entire health and research team and, if possible, also for the entire health team from the province of Rio Negro.