Congratulations Kacper for being awarded Highly Commended in the 2018 Zeshan Qureshi Award for Outstanding Achievement in Medical Education.
Kacper is a medical student at McGill Medical School in Canada who has dedicated a large amount of his spare time both before and during medical school to working on medical education projects.
“I have spent the better part of my career, either before medical school or in it, working on that future of futures – trying to make it clearer for others, trying to make it seem less trying.”
Kacper founded CHASM (the Community Health And Social Medicine incubator) to improve the health outcomes of historically marginalized communities in his local area. The project encourages students to conduct a needs assessment in partnership with a community organization, to form an interprofessional team, and to develop a project that would address the needs or social determinants of health of that population. Projects selected by CHASM benefit from its supervision for a period of one year, including mentorship, a social entrepreneurship and sustainability curriculum with bimonthly, interactive workshops, financial support, and a committed network of student leaders that support and publicize the projects. For more information, head to www.chasmincubator.com.
As well as aiding others to create and run projects that support the local community, Kacper has founded two projects that encourage medical students to be creative and reflect on their patient experiences. The Community Writing Workshop enables students to meet with authors biweekly to develop poetry and fiction writing skills and Journeys Through Health is a community art gallery that displays the work of inpatients and healthcare professionals.
Finally, Kacper also developed an ultrasound teaching workshop, having noticed that there was not much emphasis on this clinical skill during his undergraduate education: www.sonoisti.com.
“I have created medical education projects that not only showcase medicine’s holism, from the technical to public health to the narrative, but rather, nurture a way to create that very same change I have seen. Anything else is secondary. To see the true impact of education is to enable the possibility for all to experience it, to be influenced by care that is considerate, careful, and total. It is to turn that very experiment it is into something else: real difference, real hope, and real ability to heal, in all its forms.”
Congratulations on this fantastic achievement, Kacper.