Part of the impact COVID19 had on our students especially medical and health students were the cancellation of their clinical placements. Clinical placements are a key requirement of their professional career. So as students' Union leaders, we needed to ensure that the University put in place a mitigation plan to mitigate the lost clinical experience. We first fought for our new Postgraduate-Taught Officer for the Faculty of Biology Medicine and Health (FBMH), Shoukat Ashiti, to gain a seat on the Faculty’s Clinical Placement Group to be part of all the respective decision making. Shoukat did a wonderful Job with his contribution to the group’s meetings, ensuring that students’ voice from his faculty were embedded in the group's decisions. He escalated issues that required my attention and we had meetings with the respective university senior leader to ensure such issues were sorted ASAP.

Below is Shoukat’s update on the positive outcome of his negotiations:

I can say that as a result of fruitful discussions and meetings between us and the University, we managed to secure the clinical compensation and now all programmes leads are planning the scheduling of the placements, as well as any related consequences such as visa extension, graduation delay, etc.  However, our mission was not that simple so let me take you through it in details.  Before being elected as the Postgraduate-Taught officer for FBMH, I met with Kwame and discussed with him how COVID19 was negatively impacting students’ clinical training. COVID19's impact at my faculty led me into contesting for the SU Postgraduate taught officer position for my faculty and won. 

It was not easy getting on the clinical placement group but thanks to Kwame’s efforts, we got there in the end.  We managed to be in contact with all FBMH clinical programme leads and receive updates on the current situation of each programme.  A meeting was arranged where course reps came and shared some of the problems, concerns and suggestions that were unique to their course/programmes.  We collated the feedback and ensured that it was present to the Faculty clinical placement group meetings that I was attending every fortnight. Kwame and I pushed for a template of questions to be sent to all programme leads, to answer it and send it back to their students.  These questions were aimed at clarifying the current plans of the University on mitigating lost clinical placement, the position of the regulatory bodies regarding the missing training and the proposed plans on how clinical compensation will be.  So now that we have secured the clinical compensation for students, our next plan is to make sure all the respective students receive their clinical compensation as promised and that the quality of the clinical training will be as expected and Covid19’s impact becomes as minimal as possible on the students.   

By:
 
Kwame Asamoah Kwarteng
General Secretary

Shoukat Ashiti
FBMH Postgraduate Taught Officer