This year's MEFANET Conference Highlights the Growing Importance of Simulation Medicine

Unlike a number of other events that were put on hold for two years by the coronavirus pandemic, the MEFANET conference missed only the one year before the last. This year, on its half-centenary, the institutions associated with the eponymous educational network had the opportunity to take an initial look back at how the meeting of medical professionals has evolved over the years. The conference of Czech and Slovak medical faculties focused on e-learning and medical informatics in medical education was held for the fifteenth time.

At the beginning of November, several dozen experts from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but also from abroad, as is already the rule, came to the Continental Hotel in Brno to visit MEFANET. The British delegation was joined by Panagiotis Bamidis, one of the keynote speakers and a professor of medical physics, informatics and medical education from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who knew the conference environment well from previous years.

This year, he followed up on his earlier contributions by presenting the CluedUp project (Collaborative Learning Using Escape Designs and Pedagogies), which is a pedagogical method using the phenomenon of escape games to develop knowledge and skills. However, gamification, as one of today's e-learning trends, taking into account the expectations of Generation Z students, resonated with other outcomes. The participants of the conference could appreciate this when Daniel Schwarz and his colleagues from the Institute of Simulation Medicine interactively walked them through one of the sample diagnostic cases of virtual patients of the Laurie project.

On the second day, Petr Štourač, Head of the Institute of Simulation Medicine, introduced the Simulation Centre of the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University SIMU as an integral part of postgraduate education and a mandatory curriculum of every modern medical faculty. "So far, we knew what the students had been through. Thanks to the simulation centres, we will also know in the future how they went through it," he mentioned, also referring to the first PhD students of the Simulation in Medicine programme, whose development is largely based on the foundations of SIMU.

"I rate this year's conference, also with regard to the past editions, as very successful, not only in terms of participation, but mainly in terms of content. The quality of the papers presented was at a very high level and it showed how the field of modern technologies and methodological approaches in the teaching of medical and healthcare disciplines is growing. In the future, it is possible that supporting topics such as objective structured clinical trials or technologies in the teaching of medical curricula will get their own section or workshop," comments one of the organizers, Martin Komenda from the Institute of Simulation Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University.