TNMU Teachers Developed Their Skills of Effective Communication
On February 10-11, 2021, the teachers of I. Horbachevsky Ternopil National Medical University developed their skills at the training “Effective communication at medical university”. It was organized by the coordinators of the Ukrainian-Swiss project “Development of Medical Education”.
The instructors of this event were Matvii Khrenov, the adviser to the Minister of Health Care (2018-2020) and Oleksii Kovzhun, a media expert.
For two days, the representatives of TNMU heard new information and practiced their skills on the following topics: “The relationship between a manager and a subordinate. How to implement the idea within a large bureaucratic system”, “Understand yourself and your leader”, “Fundamentals of communication”, “Allies and stakeholders. How creating a coalition benefits realizing the idea”.
Tetiana Stepurko, the Head of the Office for Implementation of the Ukrainian-Swiss Project “Medical Education Development” mentioned: “Since the beginning of 2020 the team of project managers has formed an idea that the development of medical education is also the advance of university potential. One of the directions of development of medical universities is development of managerial abilities, and communication is their component. During these two days, the participants learn how to make decisions in their lives, how to communicate with colleagues and what to do to realize their ideas. It is very nice to see that your university has many innovative and open practices in medical education. And the main task of the training is to learn to convey these ideas to those who can help implement them.”
Tetyana Stepurko also said that within the project, during the development of training programs, the coordinators were guided by the basic principles of the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Education and the articles of the Law of Ukraine “On Higher Education”. She added that according to current legislation, universities are autonomous institutions. “Not all free economic zones have tools and not everyone understands what tools can be used to improve and expand their autonomy. We work with international colleagues, who develop educational policy in Ukraine. So, we see what tools are lacking and try to share our knowledge and experience. These are often even very simple tools like communication skills. You just have to be unindifferent, motivated, having desire to change the situation for the better,” said the head of the Office for Implementation of the Ukrainian-Swiss Project “Development of Medical Education”.
Tetyana Stepurko also noted that the project team works more at the invitation of universities. “We have specific areas of work. For example, it is necessary to improve the curricula, to help set up the simulation centre… If we see that these areas can develop better with certain tools, we ask if such tools are really necessary. If we receive an affirmative answer from a university, we organise training,” says Ms. Tatiana. “One of the topics of the trainings arose during our first communication series in Chernivtsi and Lviv. Our coaches saw that there were not enough tools for strategic development. Communication is important and effective when people understand the direction they are moving, how and what they want to achieve. From March this year we are starting trainings on strategic development of a university. During the trainings and communication with the representatives of the universities, we saw that everyone had a strategy, but the quality of this strategy can be better.”
The head of the Office for Implementation of the Ukrainian-Swiss Project “Development of Medical Education” noted that the representatives of medical universities can contact her to arrange trainings by e-mail or phone. All contact details are available on the project website.
Yanina Chaikivska, TNMU Press Secretary
Photos by the author