Summer Conference: The Line Up

The 2022 UHMLG Summer Conference will be our first in-person event since 2019, and will cover a range of topics that will help ourselves, our students, and all of society.

For Students:

How are our services adapting post-lockdown?* How has our teaching changed? The lockdown teaching environment forced us into the deployment of online teaching in a way many had not been dealing with before – but now that teaching is returning to campus, how are we taking the best of what we’ve learned in the last two years and applied that to our services and teaching going forward?

We’ll be reviewing the experience of several organisations as they’ve adapted to the post-lockdown world and sharing the changes that they have and / or intend to make for the benefit of our students.

* Note: not necessarily the same as “post-pandemic”!

For Staff:

Even before 2020, supporting the mental health of staff was high on the agenda for HEIs around the country – but the pandemic supercharged efforts, thanks in no small part to concerns about staff feeling isolated whilst working at home, and the huge workloads associated with the lightning-fast transition to remote working.

Although staff are returning to campus, the need for good mental health support hasn’t lessened – we’re still affected by huge workloads, and the pandemic has been the catalyst for many changes which is always a challenge for our wellbeing.

With that in mind, we have two sessions focused on efforts to support mental health: from the University of Edinburgh we’ll find out from Ruthanne Baxter how they’ve been innovating in supporting staff mental wellbeing, and from the Royal College of Nursing we’ll join in with a “How To…” session as we get a taster of their approach to supporting staff through the pandemic.

For Society:

In this year’s Spring Forum (videos now available online) Ramona Naicker discussed “Critical Appraisal for Anti-Racism“. The talk was extremely well-received, and we’re well aware of the interest in critical appraisal generally. So we are delighted to welcome Ramona back for two very pratical sessions:

• Critical Appraisal for Anti-Racism: A Train the Trainer Event. Get direct help on how you can develop your critical appraisal teaching, and ensure that anti-racism is included as part of it.
• Developing Anti-Racism Appraisal Questions. To ensure that critical appraisal covers issues racism we need a set of questions to investigate and test this. Our workshop will help develop a set of questions that can be used in conjunction with the CASP checklists – join in, and you can contribute to a really important piece of work for the medical community, and society as a whole!