RCSITogether Bulletin 5 – Virtual Meetings, Peer Obsercation, Covid-19 Hub, Library Resources, Apps to Meditate – 7th April 2020
Dear Colleagues
I hope it is as nice a day where you are as it is here for me – I need to get out for a walk now! Today’s bulletin is covering a range of topics from virtual meetings, an area we are all becoming experts in, to helping children focus on the positives. I hope you find something useful to you within this bulletin. As always your feedback, comments and contributions are welcome.
Our next bulletin will be on Thursday instead of Friday as we will be closing at lunchtime Thursday (9th) to commence the Easter break, coming back on Wednesday the 15th April following the Townhall meeting.
- #RCSItogether Learning:
Today we’re sharing a short article on Leading Virtual Meetings from the Kings Fund – a charitable organisation in the UK who support improvement in health and care. We’re all learning on a daily basis how to get the most from online meetings and this short article looks at both the technical and the human skills you need to engage with colleagues and ensure your virtual meetings are productive.
Also a timely reminder that HPEC are running an online session tomorrow April 8th from 10-11 to provide advice on how to use the peer observation of teaching programme to further your online teaching practice. The session will be live on Moodle at this link:. Peer observation is a really helpful way of getting trusted feedback from a colleague and is particularly useful at this time for anyone new to teaching online.
- #RCSItogether Health Science:
To promote scientific collaboration and openness during these unprecedented times, the European Pharmaceutical Review’s sister title Drug Target Review has launched a COVID-19 research hub. Including news, articles and a forum for discussion, the hub allows you to discover and share your thoughts on the latest pre-clinical coronavirus treatment and vaccine developments.
The hub is also a platform to share COVID-19 drug discovery findings. You can also use their submission box to send in any coronavirus-related research you would like to publish. Click on this link to SHARE YOUR RESEARCH
Our RCSI Library Team have also developed resources, including search strategies for medical databases, government and national healthcare websites, and resources made available by publishers to facilitate international research. Please click here to access them.
- #RCSItogether Minding Others:
Last week on Workvivo, Catriona Campbell shared a wellbeing journal to help kids focus on the positive during these challenging times. The authors run a schools programme called ‘Weaving Wellbeing’ and have made this journal available for free to support kids mental health. Even if you don’t have a printer at home the questions are nice prompts for conversations on resilience, gratitude and dealing with stress.
- #RCSItogether Minding Yourself:
Dr. Padraic Dunne’s live meditation sessions continue tomorrow at 4pm, you can join through this link – Attention Based Training Week 3 – Weds 8th April @ 4pm GMT
If you have been following along with the sessions you’ll (hopefully) be practicing your timed meditations in the morning and evening. A great free app that can help you continue or start your meditation journey is the Insight Timer App. The app features a timer for your own self meditations and also has over 30,000 free guided meditations, music, and talks led by the world’s leading meditation and mindfulness experts, neuroscientists, psychologists and teachers from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Oxford and more. Areas covered include Sleep, Stress, Gratitude, Self-Compassion and Kids Meditations.
Take care,
Barry