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Balint Group Sessions for Medical Students: A Pilot Study
- Victoria Cowell, Chukwunwike Ayalogu, Annette Ros, Harvey Brown, Bayode Shittu, Anusha Akella, Adeolu Lasisi, James Bancroft, Holly Whitcroft, Indu Surendran, Christopher Bu, Abby Older, Eleanor Gaynor, Kathia Sullivan
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- Journal:
- BJPsych Open / Volume 9 / Issue S1 / July 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 July 2023, pp. S16-S17
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- Article
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Aims
The issue of health and well-being amongst the National Health Service (NHS) workforce has never been so prominent. Balint groups are facilitated discussion sessions aiming to help clinicians reach a better understanding of the emotional content of the doctor-patient relationship. Evidence suggests participation decreases rates of burnout and increases empathic ability. A Balint group pilot scheme for medical students was launched within Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP), facilitated by both core and higher trainees in psychiatry, and supervised by a consultant psychotherapist. Feedback from both participants and facilitators was collected to gain a greater understanding of how these groups can shape our clinical interactions, and benefit the mental well-being of both patient and doctor.
MethodsWe approached the University of Liverpool School of Medicine, who did not have a formal Balint programme, and proposed a pilot scheme with 4th year medical students rotating through psychiatry in CWP.
Sessions were conducted in four week blocks, during a student's psychiatry rotation, and were facilitated by two psychiatry trainees. At the end of each block, anonymised feedback was collected, and small alterations were made to the programme during the course of the pilot in response to attendance rates, punctuality and feedback.
Results143 students participated in the programme in the first 11 cohorts, between September 2021 and December 2022, and 72 (50.3%) submitted feedback forms.
98.6% agreed that the programme helped them reflect more on their interactions with patients, and that it helped them gain insight into how others think and feel when caring for patients.
91.7% enjoyed the groups and 97.3% would use the skills learnt in Balint group in the future.
100% of students gave a positive response when rating their overall experience of the programme.
Facilitators reported increased confidence in their psychotherapeutic knowledge, and an improvement in leadership and communication skills.
ConclusionThe student experience of the Balint programme was positive for the vast majority, and from a facilitator perspective, we have found involvement to be very rewarding.
Psychiatry trainee group facilitation was well received by students, allowed a greater number of groups to run, and is beneficial for trainees’ professional development.
Before this pilot, approximately only 1/3 of University of Liverpool medical students had the opportunity to attend a Balint group.
However, our findings have contributed to a decision by the University of Liverpool to extend the scheme to all 4th year students on psychiatry placement from August 2023.
Chapter 7 - Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42
- Eleonora Sasso
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- Book:
- Late Victorian Orientalism
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 04 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2020, pp 133-162
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Summary
The process of colonisation of a territory requires not just the construction of practices of legitimacy by the coloniser, but, prior to that, the methodological construction of representation itself. This representation is not necessarily drawn from the terrain, but often pre-applied and forced upon observation. It is within this messy, partially fictive compound that perceptually unstable, social and spatial identities are generated. Yet how do such pieces get assembled?
This chapter will reconstruct how the Anglo-Chinese colony on Hong Kong Island was first presented to itself in the year of its colonial birth. This reconstruction will be grafted upon the spine of two excerpts of a now lost early Victorian travelogue, a book entitled Hongkong and the Hongkonians (1841/42), together with an assemblage of archive and published original sources – cartography, building surveys, China art, construction-method studies, and newspaper tirades. This book first played simultaneously to a British home audience, employing techniques of literary drama, it then was refracted through newspaper extracts back to a colonial one, forcing the colonists to confront an imported vocabulary that described their miniscule but rapidly changing social, urban and architectural cosmos. The chapter will show that this very representation was, in part, borrowed from earlier British representations of China, India and the wider world, employing a mixture of genres, from tropes within early Victorian novels to tableaux within late eighteenth-century Oriental prints.
Such a realisation presents a challenge for those attempting to recover a history from the account, since it involves a disengagement from the material as simply one kind of evidence, of eyewitness testimonial, and a re-engagement with it through a set of different questions: questions that ask if historical reconstruction is even possible let alone desirable; if the author's intentions towards the audience is recoverable let alone their constituencies knowable; while all is affected by the nature and purpose of one's own scholarly engagement as a researcher. For instance, are we interested in a genre history of the travelogue or in a history consequent upon the contents of that travelogue? Or are we willing to position ourselves uncomfortably between the two?
The Hong Kong Fever of 1843: Collective Trauma and the Reconfiguring of Colonial Space
- CHRISTOPHER COWELL
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- Journal:
- Modern Asian Studies / Volume 47 / Issue 2 / March 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 August 2012, pp. 329-364
- Print publication:
- March 2013
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This paper adds to a relatively new line of research investigating inadvertent transformations of urban colonial space generated by collective trauma. To the now classic iterative, and racial dynamics of Neild's ‘accommodation’ in the development of Madras,1 and of Yeoh's ‘contesting’ of the built environment in Singapore2—specifically in the tugging and pulling between local and colonial influences within the spatial discourse of colonial port cities—needs to be added that of single or multiple-event collective trauma. Such trauma, perceived as brought upon by unexpected external causes, might consolidate, perhaps accelerate, or even sever a previous sequence of spatial negotiation, particularly if that sequence was politically vulnerable or immature. The paper is a focused account of such an occurrence: the small-scale yet intensely traumatic events of Hong Kong Island while still in its colonial infancy in 1843, the year of the ‘Hongkong Fever’. It argues that a new conception of malaria—considered then a miasma—now linked both to location and construction, led to the first reactive, yet decisive, reconfiguring of a previously improvised urban colonization process, consequently salvaging Hong Kong's position within a wider imperial context.