Aidin Parnia;

LPO of Isfahan

(IFMSA-IRAN)

Here we are, after a month, this is my first

official report as LPO of my orange family. That’s

a real honor to be the first but surely not the last

Isfahan public health officer and it makes my

responsibility even more when I’m working with

my talented friends. For sure all we have done in

the last month was just some small steps toward

our long journey for higher aims but I hope that

you can enjoy every scene during this journey

and every single small goal we achieved.

As I told you before there are lots of exciting,

unbelievable learning situations and joyful times

in SCOPH family and we still can make much

more. Just remember to stay tight with your

family, because that’s how it works.

My last words to you, for now of course, enjoy

what you do but consider doing it quickly, cleanly

and precisely.

Orange Days

Contents:

LC of Isfahan 2

More than just a doctor 3

Peer learning 4

Isfahan SCOPH report 5

Being a SCOPHian 7

Stay Connected 9

Enlarge your dreams 10

A letter from a member 11

IFMSA AM 2012 12

Nothing but everything 13

Our Orange Path

Isfahan SCOPH Newsletter

July 2012; Issue 1, Year 1

Contact:

IFMSA-IRAN/Isfahan-SCOPH

SCOPH.isf@gmail.com

www.scoph-isf.ir

Isfahan Standing Committee on Public Health

– IRAN Medical Student’s Association -

International Federation of Medical Students’

Associations

Thanks to all my dear IFMSA-family at

LC of Isfahan who worked hard to bring

IFMSA to our university. On June 10th,

2012 these dedicated people held an

Introduction session in which more than

80 students attended and LC of Isfahan

officially started its work.

Although there are more talented,

dedicated, hard worker students at

Isfahan University of Medical Sciences

who we hope will join us soon. We, as a

part of IFMSA-family at Isfahan will do

our best to get more students involved

and try to make LC of Isfahan a great

opportunity for all.

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Naeimehossadat Hosseini

Vice of LPO of Isfahan

(IFMSA-IRAN)

I started my internship 4 months ago. Have never

been so much involved with the patients, have

never felt so responsible.

It is has been a huge step forward. About one

month later, I was just a student, wandering

between wards or better to say, simply passing

by. Now, I am responsible for a patient. I am no

more a bystander. And that makes me think

about things happening around me. I have to

take care of lives; people who are in need of

help, take the pain away and reassure them. That

I see as the best part of medicine. Helping people

relieve. But there are times I ask myself why so

much people seek medical care every day? What

do we lack in between? Every year such big deal

of money is spent on medications and

para-clinics, what can we do to stop this vicious

cycle?

آنجا هک عنایتست، هچ صلح و هچ جنگ

تسبیح و هچ جنگ ور کار نیک است، هچ

گر مرد قبول است، هچ رومی و هچ زنگ

تسلیم و رضا باید و هن سر و سنگ

Where kindness is, who

cares for peace or war?

Where goodness acts,

who hears prayer or

quarrel?

When a man's accepted,

who cares where he's

from?

Surrender, yield; if not,

your pride's a stone.

#1077, from Rumi's Kolliyaat-e

Shams-e Tabrizi

Translated by Zara Houshmand

http://www.iranian.com/A

rts/rumi.html

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Not so long ago, doctors were recognized as

healers, if one got sick, he/she would seek a

doctor to find a remedy for the pain. But things

changed upon time. Treating the diseases were

no more the priority but prevention. Why bother

spending that much money on treating lung

cancer when simply it could be prevented by

warning people about the consequences of

smoking? Why investigating so much money on

treating people when a routine self-exam can

have a tremendous role?

In my country –like many other countries, many

people call for a doctor when they are affected

by a disease. Many people still believe doctors as

healers. Here is a question I ask myself almost all

the time, where do “I” stand? Am I just a healer?

Or am I meant to be someone more than just a

healer? I care, and that’s what makes me feel

more responsible. How can I help? I found the

satisfaction I was looking for in SCOPH. Being a

SCOPian helped me to have a holistic view, to

spend time on educating people rather than

treating them. It won`t take much time, but it

will have a great impact. Health is a gift many of

us are honored with, but keeping it is not easy.

Diseases are burdens, not only for the one

affected, but for the whole society. For a healthy

society, we, as soon to be doctors, can have a

huge impact, if only we care.

Peer Learning

Fereshte Tavakkoli Member of Isfahan SCOPH Nowadays, despite many achievements in science and technology, people are so busy that they don’t have time for learning different things through the books. In my opinion, in this situation, the best thing to do is teamwork. According or simply according to one`s experiences, we can suppose that he/she is a collection of different knowledge, behaviors, ideas and etc. So when we work together we can use others experiences and learn the positive aspects of each other. That’s so like reading the books written within people.

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How we make it work?

For every young and new group or organization planning is a vital step.

Although, planning and developing a map to reach goals is always important

but when you start something new it needs precise plans. By the way, about

a month ago we just decided to bring a branch of SCOPH family to Isfahan.

Since then we have done all we could to make our small SCOPH family bigger,

stronger and smarter. To do this, the search for information and setup need

assessment was done by the LPO and his vice. With these results 4 main

Goals were established to set up our new SCOPH family and a deadline was

estimated for them.

Title of these 4 setting up main goals was:

1. Creating the draft of Isfahan SCOPH internal constitute.

2. Publishing Isfahan SCOPH projects manual and guideline.

3. Creating Isfahan SCOPH recruitment and motivation plan.

4. Creating Isfahan SCOPH annual action plan for 2012-13.

After understanding our goals we started to find out what resources we

needed to reach them. Of course we needed more people to get involved. So

we created organization chart for our family setup team. Through this chart 3

divisions and 1 executive board were defined. These 3 divisions which fit to

our established goals are:

- Project management division

- Resource management division

- Planning and development division

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Recruitment for Isfahan SCOPH setup team was made through 1 week and

followed 2 major goals which were:

1. Bringing more experienced medical students together to increase the

efficacy of setup team.

2. Involving less experienced medical students to establish peer

learning situation and make them ready for further Isfahan SCOPH

actions.

Isfahan SCOPH setup team invitations

were sent for 32 medical students with

about 70% response rate; 26 of responders

were accepted and invited to attend the

1st Isfahan SCOPH official meeting.

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Maryam Fakhri

Planning and Development

Officer of

Isfahan SCOPH

(IFMSA-IRAN)

When I was a kid I always thought that I should

help people somehow in my future career which

was assumed to be medicine most of the time. It

took time to understand helping people as a

physician is something beyond a childish dream

of examining, smiling and prescribing kindly in an

office. It took further years of studying in medical

school to understand your greatest help to your

people as a doctor is not to cure what they are

suffering from. Experiencing medical school, I

gradually understood if I care health problems

encountering my people, or claim that I care, my

debt is not paid even if I decide to visit patients

for free! I wondered that people health problems

had been increased as I was growing up or it was

the matter of being in the arena, the matter of

awareness!

Who wants to be a

SCOPHian?

Do you care about your

family, society, country or

every people in the world?

If you don’t SCOPH has

something for you!

No surprise, SCOPH works

great for people who care

but it can show to people

who don’t the importance

of public health.

At this time Isfahan SCOPH

doesn’t accept new

membership application.

By the way the application

form will be available for

those who are interested

but recruitment starts at

the end of this summer.

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The more we went ahead, the longer the way appeared and the more

unobtainable the health targets seemed to be gained solely. You looked to be

eligible enough to give your people a hand for having the least need of

unnecessary visits and the highest level of necessary awareness and access to

required health care. Passing every year, every semester, every exam and

every patient you got nearer to experience the fact that what is known as

health services actually belong to everyone, from the nearest towns to the

farthest rural areas, and you wished you could make this notion true.

It took some more time that I made sure there are many things that I, as a

medical student, even as the eligible one, cannot do solely in such a long way.

What about the childhood dream!? What about all notions and desires. It

was just the time I made a wish just the same as yours. To have the power to

show what can be changed by me maybe by having a chance to gather some

people, some friends and some medical students of the same concern!

What if your dream has been made true now?! What if SCOPH is that desired

gathering and SCOPHians are those friends of yours having the concern of

public health, just as yours.

What if you have got the chance to be a member of SCOPH big family to

make your power double and present it to the world!

Today is your day. Your whole asset! Do you still think about our childhood

dream? Do you think about the plan of tomorrow?

Tomorrow will always be there, waiting for us to make the most of it. But we

cannot make the most of tomorrow without first making the most of today!

Just remember the dream and let’s join together…and join tomorrow…for

making tomorrows …

Under the orange flag of SCOPH

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Aidin Parnia; LPO of Isfahan (IFMSA-IRAN)

That was long time ago that people dreamed

about talking to each other from miles away. I

don’t remember because I wasn’t born that

time! But I remember how technology

changed our life. Except my personal interest

in mobile computer technologies there are

some reasons why I insist on using new world

simplest technologies to stay connected and

use them to collaborate in our SCOPH-family.

The first reason is we can use them for free! The second one is using the

online social tools and teamwork solutions help us to get more time thorough

our busy time and university schedule. So we found these online solutions

best to do our job and have our individual timetables. Of course there are

more reasons like archiving documents on the cloud or working on instant

updated documents. For sure getting ready for the next technology

revelation in future can be another reason.

Anyway within Isfahan SCOPH-family we use these simple solutions even if

my colleague lives 2 blocks away. We are looking at it like a practice for

better performance on long distance collaboration. Just for example we use

Google drive to share, archive and work together on documents and projects.

This is not a big deal but keeps our cost near zero. This is not an Ad for

Google services but I’ve found these services really useful for small working

groups and small businesses.

9

Maede Rajaeefar

Member of Project management division of

Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN)

For most of us when starting medical school, studying turns into our first

priority. Years and years we sit behind our desks and every day we become

more distant from the society. We forget this important fact that the people

we intend to cure in future are those around us. Being trained that way, is it

possible to complete our duty as a doctor? Why imprisoning ourselves in care

centers and limiting our role to that instead of promoting peoples health?

The motive for establishing SCOPH was giving an answer to this question. By

entering SCOPH, your field of vision will be switched from individuals to

population. You seek to explore, analyze and get round the problems before

they progress and become widespread. This is what “prevention is prior to

treatment” means. On the other hand you have access to a community of

medical students around the world who can share all their experiments,

expertise, trainings and ideas with you.

The aim is not only raising awareness of your society's issues, but also

becoming familiar with other countries health difficulties and the manner of

encountering them. These experiences can be more valuable than reading

hundreds of books.

The object is not limited to medical problems. Indeed health difficulties

contain all health policies, transnational disagreements, deprivations and

inequalities which you can struggle with, through the organizing and

communication skills you learn in SCOPH. That’s how you become a better

healthcare professional.

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Sadegh Baradaran Mahdavi

Member of Project management division of

Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN)

My dear SCOPHian partners In this handwriting I’m going to tell you a little about “Health” and in better word “Public Health”. I’m sure that you know all about this but I’m here just to emphasize some parts which to me, sounds important.

Since we were born, Health has been one of our most important issues and has affected many aspects of our lives such as our work and our life style. Remembering how it felt in your childhood during a severe cold or terrible flu helps you to understand how a little infectious disease can disturb your daily tasks and cause disability and create inappropriate feelings. So definitely that time you didn’t have any other choice, rather trying to tolerate it and hoping for the treatment to work. Did you?

In addition, nobody wants to get sick and almost everybody hates diseases and being ill. But this favorite doesn’t deny the fact that there are many acute, severe, dangerous or simple diseases all around the world. Our today’s health can easily change to an unwanted status which doesn’t accommodate with our desires necessarily. As future doctors and also as SCOPHians, we are responsible for public and professional health care in the community. I believe that we are going to be lucky in our profession if we consider the role of public health among the healthy individuals and make ourselves ready to learn and then educate people.

I want to say that public health can modify the behaviors and that’s a very important goal. All of us know that doing half an hour exercise a day will protect us against many chronic and long term diseases in the future. But how many percent of doctors –and not ordinary individuals, follow this guide them self?

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Here are some tips to develop our points of view about everything that is important, when we talk and think about Health as SCOPHians: We should update our knowledge and skills. It isn’t achievable simply by passing our obligatory courses and boring repeated lessons. We should motivate ourselves with getting involved with the process of conducting research to find scientific articles. We should share our experience and skills with each other any time we find them useful for our partners.

If we want to do something beneficial in future, we should begin from ourselves.

Orange wishes

Felora Ferdosi

LPO Assistant on

Project management

Isfahan SCOPH

(IFMSA-IRAN)

Now it comes to GA. It stands for General

Assembly which is a biannual meeting held in

a different country every time. In this

meeting IFMSA officials from all over the

world gather and are involved in different

trainings, evaluation and planning programs.

61st GA is going to happen in India. I really

feel lucky to attend this meeting as a SCHOPH

agent. Since we are a new-born committee

we have a long way to go. My main

achievement will be making new contacts

through talking to other country’s authorities,

introducing our committee, high potential

city, country, people and expressing our

desire to communicate and cooperate in

different fields. I will also try to get more

information about projects, how they

manage them and their financial policies.

I hope I can effectively discuss the matters

of our federation and help our committee

grow to some extents.

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Bahare Nasr

Member of Resource management division of

Isfahan SCOPH (IFMSA-IRAN)

We’ve all heard the word "brain storming". Brain storming is a tool used by

teams to bring out the ideas of each individual and present them in an

orderly fashion to the rest of the team. The key ingredient is to provide an

environment free of criticism for a creative and unrestricted exploration of

options and solutions. I think we should use this method in our committee

for more advance.

For acting more with better result we have to know more about our people,

society and its needs and accord our goals with it. It’s ok to use other

SCOPH’s project but we should have in mind that our people’s needs, our

culture and our facilities are different from other countries.

For knowing more about our people and their needs, following steps are

recommended:

- Getting information from faculty of health.

- Asking for consult from public health providers.

- Getting information and also help from national, regional and

international health and public health organizations.

As we are acting as a local committee we should alter our goals to deprived

and poor areas of Isfahan province. There are many impassable areas in

which people are not even familiar with basics of being healthy.

Last but not least, I think we should remember that we are working for public

health and as the definition of public health we should dedicate ourselves for

people. “It is health that brings us all together”.

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Imprint

Editors in Chief Naeimehossadat Hosseini

Content Editors

Aidin Parnia

Maryam Fakhri

Layout / Design

Aidin Parnia

Authors Aidin Parnia

Naeimehossadat Hosseini

Maryam Fakhri

Felora Ferdosi

Fereshte Tavakkoli

Maede Rajaeefar

Sadegh Baradaran

Bahare Nasr

Niloufar Razavi

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