TNMU’s Associate Professors Took Part in the School of Extra-Medical Education
The School of Extra-Medical Education was held as part of the cooperation between the Ukrainian-Swiss Project and the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC), attended by Sofiia Husak and Iryna Borovyk, Associate Professors of the I. Horbachevsky Ternopil National Medical University.
The event was divided into three strategic sessions: Systems, Society and People, each lasting 3 days.
The program of the event was very intense, but also clearly structured, and included homework and group assignments, work with cases in small groups, reading, and many discussions and interactions. Reputable and charismatic speakers with extremely interesting and relevant topics that logically complemented each other, as well as dialogue and interaction with colleagues, medical educators from different parts of Ukraine—Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Odesa, Kyiv, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Ternopil—created an unforgettable atmosphere of the School.
The first session was solemnly opened by Serhii Kvit, President of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, with a report titled Education as Ability, Responsibility, and Need.
Pavlo Kovtoniuk, co-founder of the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC) and one of the architects of healthcare financing reform in Ukraine, former Deputy Minister of Health, continued the session with a methodical and in-depth discussion of healthcare systems (we finally got the hang of it).
Next, Oleksandr Linchevskyi, Chief Medical Director of the Dobrobut network and surgeon at the SSU Military Medical Department, spoke about medical education, and Yevhen Hlibovytskyi, an expert on long-term strategies, presented a report on Peculiarities of Relations between Citizens and the State in Ukraine and Their Impact on the Formation of Trust. Andriy Vyshnevsky, an expert in civil service and justice reform, presented a modern view of the political philosophy of health.
A lot of information, discussions, questions, group interaction, and reflections. The first session is now closed.
On June 13-15, the School participants came to Lviv to continue their studies. The second session was devoted to worldview, philosophy, and the search for the meaning of life. Sviatoslav Motren, a lecturer at UCU, presented a complex and profound topic on Political Philosophy.
The highlight of the session was the presentation by Myroslav Marynovych, a well-known Ukrainian public figure, founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, dissident and political prisoner. Peculiarities of Ukrainian Identity and Nation-Building was the title of his report. “Moral hemophilia”, ‘atamanism’, ‘identity networking’, ‘unity in diversity’ were the key concepts that were discussed in detail.
The next day, we worked on ethics and leadership at the author’s course by Matvii Khrenov, co-founder of the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, Advisor to the Minister of Health of Ukraine (2018-2020), Advisor to the Head of the National Health Service of Ukraine (2020-2021).
This session was also memorable for the meeting with Andrii Liubka, a writer, novelist, and volunteer. He presented a report based on his book of the same name, Friend or Foe. In Search of Barbarians.
The participants of the event had a lot of impressions after visiting the bright and unforgettable “I Gallery”, an art project by Pavlo Hudimov.
The final session of the School of Extra-Medical Education took place on July 11-13 outside the city, in the cozy location of Viking Bay, where the atmosphere was most conducive to focusing on people. The curator of the third session, Natalia Riabtseva, co-founder of UHC, lecturer at the School of Healthcare Management at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Deputy Head of the National Health Service of Ukraine (2019-2020), Head of the Office for Healthcare Financing Reform Implementation at the Ministry of Health (2017-2019), provided an atmosphere of lightness and interest.
Valerii Pekar, a public figure, lecturer at the Kyiv Mohyla Business School and the Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, presented an interesting topic on the Evolution of Thinking, Leadership and Management. The presentation was based on Valerii’s book Multicolored Management.
At this session, the report “Ethics of Decision Making” by Fr. Pavlo Hud, a priest of the UGCC and deputy dean of the UCU Faculty of Social Sciences, was unforgettable. It seems that we have never solved so many ethical dilemmas. The discussions about good and evil, about why good people sometimes do bad things, made everyone plunge into philosophical reflections.
As always, the sessions were filled with readings and discussions, but this time our interaction was coordinated by Bohdana Neborak, a Ukrainian journalist, lawyer, cultural manager, literary critic, and host of the Untitled podcast.
We discussed the short story Frogs in the Sea by Ukrainian writer Tania Maliarchuk,—written in German, for which the author received the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Prize (2018),—a fragment of Myroslav Laiuk’s Bakhmut, as well as Having Time to Live (about how food, literature, and history speak of the same thing), and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. We recommend these!
Our main final reflections:
- the purpose of education is to create an environment capable of self-reproduction
- a university is a platform for discussion
- humanity as the ability to think
- history is a teacher of life
- in times of turbulence, the greatest danger is the inertial thinking of yesterday
- change of values is the basis of transformation
- ethics is about lifestyle
- each person is responsible for his or her own face after the age of 40 (Valeriy Pekar)
- it is impossible to force everyone to be equally happy.
Information and photos provided by Sofiia Husak and Iryna Borovyk.