Dear Colleagues,
I hope you all got to enjoy some downtime over the Easter holidays, I was certainly very grateful to see the sunshine. I wanted to start today’s bulletin with a suggestion from a colleague that we all add our photo to our Outlook profile as a means of adding a face to a name when working remotely. When you are in your home page on Outlook you can easily do this by clicking into the “File” tab at the top of the screen. From here in ‘Account Settings’ you will be able to insert or change your picture. A nice way of seeing who we are ‘talking’ to throughout out day.
- #RCSItogether Learning:
Last year we had a fantastic MyHealth lecture delivered by Dr. Beth Frates on the topic of ‘Paving the Path to Wellness’. Dr. Frates is a pioneer of lifestyle medicine education and an award winning teacher at Harvard University. In this short video Dr. Frates looks at how healthy habits are formed focusing on the core pillars of exercise, nutrition, sleep and stress management. Taking a proactive approach to our health has never been more relevant and this video summarises key concepts in less than 20 minutes.
Thanks to Clare Sullivan for highlighting some upcoming webinars about delivering medical education online. They cover a variety of relevant topics including Assessment strategies and OSCEs which may be of interest to our Education colleagues.
Our last learning recommendation is a short podcast on the topic of Active Listening called ‘What does it take to really listen to someone”?. Now more than ever listening is a critical skill as we work remotely and active listening in particular helps us change our mindsets towards one that’s trying to understand someone else’s perspective, as opposed to being focused on getting our point across or being right!
- #RCSItogether Health Science:
For today, we would like to share with you a link to The Lancet’s COVID 19 Resource Centre. This free to access repository was created to assist health workers and researchers working under challenging conditions to bring this outbreak to a close. The resource brings together new 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) content from across The Lancet journals as it is published.
- #RCSItogether Minding Others:
Maria Kelly created a family history project to offer a way to connect younger and more senior family members during this time of physical distancing to explore our past, present and hopes for the future. Two sets of sample interview questions have been created, one to suit younger and another for more senior students and can be adapted to suit individual family situations. Interviews can be conducted remotely in a number of ways and it is hoped this will strengthen the bond between the young person and the senior adults in their lives during this time of separation. Details are on Workvivo.
- #RCSItogether Minding Yourself:
With the sunny weather we’ve been enjoying why not try your hand at gardening? As Prof Ronan Conroy reminded us on Workvivo today “Your garden is the bit of the environment you can control”. Gardening has been shown to reduce stress and improve mood, you can learn a new skill with the satisfying benefit of growing your own food and we can use gardens to support our many species in danger of extinction. For those of you with your own garden, Bord Bia have developed a helpful range of Gardening Guides to help you to re-discover your garden. If you live in an apartment or only have a small space there is still plenty you can do, check out this article in The Irish Times on ‘Easy-grow herbs and salads that thrive in small spaces’.
We’ll end today’s bulletin with an old Irish ‘Seanfhocal’ which is the Irish word for proverb, literally meaning ‘old word’.
Dá fhada an lá tagann an tráthnóna – No matter how long the day, the evening comes!
Have a good weekend everyone and stay safe.
Barry