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Thank you very much. Good morning everybody. Thanks uh cancer and for uh organizing all of this. Uh I do appreciate your efforts. Um And it was good to hear Tariq again and see him. Uh It's uh and for him to give us an account of what it's like to be a student from Gaza. So why are we talking about mentoring in the middle of all of what he's been talking about? How could we even think about mentoring, how we can think of anything? And, and this was the question that we were faced with when we started talking about the gym scheme in January of, of this year. Uh How could you be talking about medical education in the middle of the genocide? But part of the genocide is to destroy all the medical services, the health care system and the future of Gaza education. Excuse me, education is the future of Gaza. And therefore we had to safeguard that and we had to make sure that it does survive. And that's why the Gaza Educate Medical Scheme came about. And it has three clear objectives. One is the preservation of the two medical schools in Gaza to support their resilience against the destruction of education, to support the medical students, to progress with their studies and ultimately graduate and join the workforce in Gaza and all the infrastructure, the platform, the uh facilities that we will accumulate along the way will be the starting block for the two universities when the war is over and they start their rebuilding process. So we opened the registration on the on the scheme in March of 2024. And we have so far 2101 students registered with us. A bigger number from Al Azhar University than from the Islamic University. And 57% of the uh students are female. 81% of the students remained in Gaza. Uh while uh about 18 19% had left Gaza, 15% nearly went to Egypt and the other 5% spread around the world. And, and this is the spread of the students across the years. The year six seems to be the smallest number which is the final year of studying. Uh the biggest group is year three and, and that poses a problem because these year three students are in basic science years now this year, but next year they will require clinical placements. And therefore there will be more pressure on clinical placements both inside of Gaza and outside of Gaza. Um And we opened the scheme also for volunteers and we've been so delighted with the huge interest and huge support that we received from international faculty volunteers. So we have 760 volunteers to deliver interactive lectures which are ongoing through the platform that was uh started on the first of June. But we also, and this is where we are at the moment. We have a lot of volunteers in the student engagement and mentorship committee. And I'm grateful for all of the volunteers in this uh group who will be hopefully the mentors for our students going forward. The volunteers come from across the world. These international volunteers, 400 plus are from America. 200 plus are from the UK and the rest are are from around the world. So we, we have a geo a good geographical uh distribution of the faculty members who can be available in most countries in the world. The way the scheme is running is that we have the board of directors where the two deans of the medical schools and their deputies are uh as well as the chair of P Europe and the chair of Palm Academy. And that is the group that makes the strategic decisions for the gym scheme. And then the executive committee executes the, the the plans and the executive committee is co uh is composed of um basically the chairs of all these committees plus representatives of the partner organizations. And as I said, uh Tarek mentioned already as well. We launched the scheme officially on the first of June, the clinical education started in the first of June in Gaza. Uh And the platform was uh opened for access to the students. Uh It's a gym uh on dot online platform, gu dot online platform, which is available to the students. And as Tarek mentioned, there is the two universities have slightly different um curriculums. So I'll, I'll, I'll as her is a modular kind of curriculum while uh the Islamic University is a traditional uh kind of curriculum. So we have two ports for the different students to access to access their own learning material according to what their university used to deliver. So no change in the curriculum and no change in the curriculum delivery. So where does mentoring fit into this? What is mentoring to start with? Mentoring is the activity of giving a younger, less experienced person help and advice over a period of time. And this is what causes some confusion. Sometimes, mentoring is not teaching, mentoring is not clinical supervision. Mentoring is not surgical supervision that is not mentoring. Uh mentoring is supporting a less experienced person and giving them advice about all aspects of their progression in the UK, the GMC, the BMA, all the colleges, a advocate development and provision of mentorship schemes in all organizations. And this is the has been shown to have value and that's why we wanted to have this also in our scheme. And we feel that it's our moral and professional responsibility to provide mentorship to the students whenever they require it or they want it. The students are the future of our profession and our future of health care services in Gaza. And we need to guide them to the best of our ability to achieve the best they can achieve. There are many documents that people can refer to and read about uh mentorship and in this document, leadership and management for for all doctors by the GMC, by the General Medical Council, you can see that one of the recommendation was that you should be willing to take part in a mentoring scheme offered by your employer. So and and this is we can adapt this. You are all the volunteers volunteering to be mentors. So we do hope that you will take part and support the students of Gaza as we go forward. It was also a document ment uh uh published by the Royal College of Surgeons uh Professional and Clinical Standards in November of 2018. And it describes also what mentorship is about. And uh it does actually give a lot of details about the process and how does it work. And it does specify here as I mentioned earlier, this is not clinical or educational supervision and this is what we need to be clear about. And this is, you will see from Lucy's talk later on when she explains how it works, the actual uh benefits of from mentorship. And it's completely different to us, teaching or delivering any kind of supervision. So the key principles of mentoring are it's a relationship it must be freely entered into and there's no coercion. So our students, hopefully in Gaza will want to be mentored and the mentors that volunteers that we have on the scheme will be matched together and then they can enter into this mentor mentee relationship, obviously freely, the mentor and the mentee should have their discussions in confidence. Obviously, if there are things that patients safety or problems that um that need to be made public, then they can be made public uh depending on the situation, but it usually is a AAA confidential relationship. Uh The mentor and the mentee must agree the boundaries of the relationship um when they can have contact, uh how often they have contact, uh what are they going to be discussing? Uh so that it remains a professional kind of relationship and it doesn't stray into uh becoming a personal uh relationship. Uh a mentorship relation. Uh Yeah, relationship does require time and commitment and both may need to make an effort to be available for that, for the relationship to work and for the mentor to be able to provide appropriate mentorship and for the mentee to get the benefit out of this relationship. The way it's mo it's most beneficial is if the mentee, the student sets the agenda, what do I want from this session? Why am I talking to the mentor. So the mentee should come with questions with ideas, with the the problems that they have that they want advice about, they want to discuss uh to the mentor and then they set the agenda. It is not for the mentor to just come and spend an hour lecturing the student about what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing. That is not AAA good working mentoring relationship. But why mentoring is important and how does it support us? It prevents something called differential attainment. Differential attainment is one when there is variations in the level of education, educational achievements that occurs between different demographic groups, undertaking the same assessment, the same educational uh opportunities. So mentorship tries to actually uh level the playing field. Uh It, it it's been recognized as a channel, the differential attainment, although recognized as a challenge for medical professionals, one of the ways to get around it and to prevent it from escalating and continuing to happen is by uh mentoring the students to give them the opportunities to achieve, to their best abilities. And differential attainment manifests itself in a different, in a number of different ways uh in, in our training systems. So I'm talking about the UK trainings trainees here, but this applies everywhere across the world. So here, for example, uh the progression of trainees uh across the different training years. And you can see that international graduates have less uh progress or uh have worse progress than the UK graduates. Uh The same thing I in examinations. And this, I'm drawing in an example from our cardiothoracic uh uh fellowship exam where you have 30 candidates presented 22 po at the overall past 73%. But if you look, there's a huge difference between two groups and what are the two groups? The ones in, in blue are the trainees in uh in in national training positions. Uh While the orange is uh doctors who are not in a training, not uh position or not in a training rotation. And you can see there's a huge difference between 90% and 50%. That is differential attainment manifesting itself in an examination. Also, it has been shown uh to manifest itself in complaints. And the General Medical Council in the UK has published a lot of figures which shows that international medical graduates in the UK US and Australia are more likely to be investigated for fitness to practice concerns. Um as are ba ba ba M UK graduates. Uh But why is all this differential attainment it because the international medical graduates, the less fortunate group are not given the same opportunity. One of the other characteristics that leads to differential attainment is gender and this is gives you the percentage of uh medical graduates uh uh a medical graduates across the UK. But then, uh for example, in cardiothoracic surgery, although 50% nearly 50% are female uh doctors, very few numbers uh uh managed to become cardiac surgeons. Fif 17% uh of all cardiac surgeons in the UK are female. While the the female, the number of females or the percentage of females in in medical schools and graduating from medical schools is in excess of 50%. So what causes a differential attainment is a number of things. There are external, we can start with the individual factors within the person themselves, their learning styles, their culture, language difficulties, and these are all need to be uh understood and measures put in place to actually get over them and to negate the negative effect on on the students. And then there are institutional and cultural issues where we need to make sure that the policies for recruitment for induction for support of the trainees is exactly the same. And this goes for example, to the examination results are the trainees and non trainees getting the same educational opportunities they are not. And that's why their differential attainment is different. And in the wider context, we need to have policies that are equitable to everybody. Uh exam structures that take account of the different ethnic groups, different genders uh and different backgrounds and fitting into uh the institutional culture. And uh in a uh and in the wider complex is unconscious bias, we're all experienced unconscious bias and this is something as a mentor you need to guard against. So there are many unconscious biases that will, will come into our mind even without wanting to think about them or deciding to think about them when you are a mentor. But you need to be aware that there could be unconscious biases coming into your mind like you meet at T and you immediately like the look of them and they are presenting themselves well and you develop a good impression about them and then regardless of what they do after that or how badly they behave or whatever, you still had that im good impression, uh the, the affinity or whatever. Um But no, you need to be more uh uh objective in your judgments and try and block out any unconscious biases. Uh Another one, another unconscious virus is for example, contrast. And basically, uh you, if you have AMA MT this year and next year, you have a different min t you very likely to try and compare and contrast this minty with the previous one. And if you had a fantastic mentee in the previous previous relationship that might affect your relationship with the current minty, but it shouldn't. And the whole idea of mentorship is for us to challenge the uh the, the mentee, but at the same time, provide them with a lot of support. So if we provide them with a lot of support, but uh at the same time challenging them, uh we will end up with this area of high performance. But if we just challenge them without giving them the support, we will only stress them. Um And obviously, ii if we give them too much support and don't challenge them that we're just allowing them to be in a cozy club coasting around, not actually achieving their potential. So we need to in the relationship, challenge the, the, the MT but at the same time, give them as much support as possible. And we need to understand that human behavior in general and in trainees in students, a and medical graduates, even consultants and senior people, our behavior uh and what people see on the surface is just a fraction of what could be going on in somebody's life. And this is obviously even more relevant for the students in Gaza where they've been facing the these horrific, horrific circumstances in Gaza and their in their second year. So don't expect them to behave like a, a UK graduate or a US graduate or an Australian graduate who uh or stu medical student who's having a, a much easier life, there's no trauma in their life. So there are things that we have to consider when we are mentoring these students and uh understanding that their behavior is a reflection of what is going on in their life around them and in the surrounding environment. So just to conclude, mentoring is very useful to support students, even doctors in training, newly appointed consultants and even consultants in difficulty and even senior people can end up in problems and could benefit from mentorship. It is one of the tools to level the playing field and allow everybody all students to achieve to the best of their ability and the best of their potential. Thank you very much for listening to me and I hope I II have laid down the, the case for SPO for mentorship and why we are, we're finding it very important to set up the scheme in the in the middle of the current circumstances. Thank you for listening to me. Thank you so much, Professor Loba. Indeed, you know, um you've shared what the scheme consists, the importance of the role of mentorship when it comes to tackling uh differential attainment and how important it is for the scheme to run in inshallah. Uh Moving ahead, we'll um talk a bit more about mentorship uh with our next speaker. So if there are any um any people joining us today, if they're interested in becoming a mentor, we will share details on how you could register. Um It will be put up on our website and Inha also on our social media um page as well. So, eaa do we have a time for a question? Yes, we absolutely do. So just to start with um there's a question for Tari from Dean MZ and dean asks, how much need is there for communication, skills, training, medical ethics, training, and family medicine within the medical school curriculum? For Gazan students. OK. Thank you, Ariana. Thank you, Dean for the question. Actually, let me break the answer into three parts. As the question itself is quite like ca can be can be like separated into three parts. So regarding communication skills, so the first lecture and the first day of any medical student in Gaza in medical school is about communication skills. My very first lecture was communication skills. However, so so we we we get taught and communication skills in general. However, and this is very important, the the uh extraordinary and the horrible situation that the medical students are facing right now requires extraordinary uh teaching for communication skills. So they are in high need right now to be aware and to get taught and mentored and how to communicate in such horrible situations. Because the people of Gaza right now are under an enormous pressure from every aspect that you can imagine, not only pumping but from every aspect of life. So the people, them uh themselves are stressed, they are uh under horrible pressure, they are displaced, they are living in tents during cold winter and uh during storms and when they get and to take and uh they, they come to get health care, they will face the doctors as their first encounters. So dealing with patients in such circumstances will not be as normal as before the war. So they need the students need to be taught more and more in communication skills. And they need advanced communication skills and training. So that's something would be that very good to be included in the in your mentoring of the mentees regarding medical ethics. So the medical students in Gaza, they are they get taught in medical ethics and find a year specifically during the years, like generally, but specifically and find a year and also in the internship year. However, also because of these special circumstances, if advanced details on medical ethics can be also taught to them and presented to them in the in the mentorship uh sessions and so on, this will be very beneficial for them regarding family medicine. So uh we take the family medicine course in the summer semester after fourth year and we get, we are, we get introduced to a healthcare system because in Gaza, the majority of the primary healthcare centers are run by wa and as you know that under one now and the under one services are not as available as before and also the other family medicine centers because all of them, they got pumped and all clinics have been pumped. So what we have been taught in family medicine course, we got introduced to, we were introduced to um vaccination system in Palestine, we were introduced to the NCD S specifically the NCD S UN communicable Diseases System healthcare system in Palestine and in Gaza specifically. However, now during the war there, many people they, they die from simple complications of an cities and uh as you saw, as you saw with polio vaccination campaign. So we got the very, the very first uh Polio virus case. Um but my myelitis case in 25 years in Gaza was like last August because of a 10 month infant, that was not who was not um vaccinated against Polio virus because he was born during the war. So family medicine needs to be reintroduced to the students in an advanced way because this what what they are witnessing right now in Gaza is a very special situation. Very horrible situation. So we were taught family medicine, family medicine systems in Gaza. However, the special circumstances right now uh requires and goals and demands for um advanced training on these three aspects, family medicine, communication, skills, and medical ethics. So the whole idea revolves around the speci the special situation they are under right now. So that's a very good question and I hope my answer was enough for that. All right. Lovely. Thank you for answering that. I've just got a very short question. Um I'm sure that everyone in the chat is very keen to know about um kind of like their own specialty and how this is being taught. Um Neil is asking about oncology and cancer medicine and what's the treatment like? And what's kind of like the teaching like and what's the need currently? This is for me, right? Or for Well, well, II, I'll, I'll come in first and then you can come in II think. Yeah, I think we don't want to detract from the main focus of the training today, which is about the mentorship scheme. All, all the, all the the topics that the students should receive in their curriculum is being provided on the uh platform as well as the by the interactive lectures that we are delivering with the international faculty. But I think we we'll, we'll try and stick with the mentorship scheme today. But I'll let her explain about uh uh in oncology, where does it come in, in your curriculum? And uh what kind of uh teaching do you normally receive? OK. So regarding oncology and hemato oncology specifically, so uh we take it in fourth year and also in, in fifth year as well. Uh So we have it as a minor clinic rotation for two weeks in the only oncology hospital in Gaza and this particular hospital was bombed during like the 1st 20 days of war. So the services that this hospital provides are being cut off right now. So regarding hemo hemato oncology patients and uh the patients who require blood transfusions maybe at least like twice a week or, or 23 times a week, the the these surfaces were cut off and these services were not provided for them. So regarding the the teaching aspect for medical students, we take this rotation in this particular hospital and it got it was bumped. However, during the clinical rotations that are being provided right now for the medical students um in some hospitals and some departments of the hospitals, they have professors in such specialties and they try as much as possible to introduce the students and um make give the students the knowledge they need and the practice they need regarding these rotations. So again, this aspect was or was taught for the students in this hospital. But during these special circumstances, um the students and the professors are trying to overcome this barrier and they are uh receiving this in a particular way now. Yeah, thank you for answering that question, Tarik. Um So there's just been a couple of questions asking about um the current ratio of mentors to mentees. Now, in terms of um student registrations, we don't unfortunately have access to that at the moment, the numbers of students have registered for the scheme. However, on the, however, we are counting all students as a part of the G program that are registered with both medical schools as a part of this program. So as it stands, we have about 252 180 mentors signed up to the program of varying levels and varying expertise. And we are aiming for a 1 to 1 ratio from 252 180 mentors to about 2000 students. But obviously, this scheme is um is optional for the students. So they can choose to opt in and repair mentors, not based on kind of like experience or age or rank, but really to the most appropriate fit for the student as specified by an online form that they fill out to be paired by the mentor. So I hope that answers you um that question um with regards to kind of like expertise and all that we can touch on that later. But we really do welcome anyone and everyone who thinks that they would be able to provide mentorship to sign up to this program. And as Professor Libani has outlined in his talk, this is a professional relationship and it really depends on the student and their own individual learning, professional holistic development needs in their career path. All right now, moving on to the um next question, I'm very, I'm sure that Lucy V will touch on this later. But and Professor Laba, you've touched on this briefly during a talk as well. But Yasmin Hasan says, thank you for your informative presentation. You said we shouldn't counsel, how would we go forward if they spoke about a recent death of a family member, colleague, etcetera, bearing in mind that there may be a very high chance of this. So this touches on um safeguarding as well. Yeah, I mean, you do have to acknowledge that and you do have to empathize and sympathize with them and explore how it's affected them. But at the same time, turn it around to, to a mentorship opportunity on how to cope with that and move on. Uh Another thing we're going to add to the gym scheme is the mental health and wellbeing uh project which um hopefully we will be able to launch uh in the New Year. Uh And that will be another resource that as a mentor, if you're facing with a difficult situation like that, you could uh refer the patient on uh the student on to the mental health and wellbeing uh uh uh a scheme and that will be run by hopefully psychiatrists and psychologists who hope can have a, a 1 to 1 relationship with the, with the student and support them through whatever difficult situation they're going through. I'm sure that there will be many examples of this as you develop a AAA professional working relationship with the M with the MT. But we, we the, we shouldn't become um uh um distracted from the purpose of the mentorship, mentor mentee relationship and you're not expected to deal with the psycho psychological trauma or the counsel them or do anything like that. Unless you have the expertise. If you're a psychiatrist and you're or a psychologist, please uh feel free. But we will have another avenue for the students to be referred to uh to support them with the psychological trauma. Thank you for that. And I think Alamgir Kabir has um actually typed out a very, very important um thing in the chat as well. Um He says having been part of other mentorship groups, it is important to have support for the mentors as they will definitely be exposed to high level trauma. We must mentor the mentors regularly. So our focus will obviously be on the students and this entire program is based on is built around the students. However, I do it, however, it is absolutely important that we do look out for ourselves as well as mentors. And there will also be avenues for us as well moving forward because this is such a difficult and unprecedented situation that we are operating in and the context. Um just uh just uh there, there is an offer from somebody to be involved in the uh mental health and wellbeing scheme. Uh And please do email me uh LBA at gem edu dot online if, if you are a psychiatrist or psychologist and you want to be involved in the scheme. Uh We're particularly looking for um uh bilingual people. Um uh if it's possible but anybody is most welcome because as, as you know, you know, e expressing your feelings and, and uh psychological trauma is, is difficult to express it uh at the best of times but trying to speak it in English um while you know, it would be better if they can express it in Arabic. So if you know of, I'm not putting anybody off, please do join it. Uh But uh if, especially if you know, bilingual speaking psychiatrist or psychologist that you think might be interested also refer them on to communicate with us. Thank you.