MUMUS Halfway Update

Can you quite believe we ’ re halfway through 2023? It’s been an action-packed semester on MUMUS’s end, and I hope this article provides a glimpse of all that’s been going on behind the scenes over the last 6 months. After all, we ’ re a society that exists to serve its members, and I want to ensure that you have a detailed understanding for what we ’ ve gotten up to!

Academic

The MUMUS 4C working group, composed of Jack, Isobella, Caroline and myself, received close to 200 responses across two year levels with feedback on Year 4C attendance requirements this year. We identified 22 key findings and 16 recommendations which were analysed in a 33 page report and presented to faculty in April. We have seen immediate improvements in standardising attendance requirements across sites (particularly for O&G) and early notification for students with borderline attendance, and have received overall positive feedback from the faculty about long-term roll-out of the other recommendations made in the report.

The placement allocation timeline has been brought forward with the view to provide earlier certainty to students on where they will likely be placed for the year. We will be further advocating for the release of a timeline overview at the start of the year to provide a heads-up on when placement decisions need to be made for 2025.

Social

We ran two smooth-sailing medcamps to welcome our Year 1s and Year As into medicine, led respectively by the Year 1 Medcamp and O-week convenors, Julie and Xiang, and our Graduate VP, Faris We ran the inaugural Year A subcommittee stalls during Year A orientation this year to better connect our commencing students with the opportunities available within Monash medicine

Under the leadership of our Social VP, Meghna, we ’ ve run an abundance of social events, ranging from our yearly Welcome Back Clinical Drinks, Preclinical Medcruise, to our many first year oriented social events

Wellbeing

The Community and Wellbeing team led by Caroline has worked to create graphics illustrating the available escalation pathways for students on clinical placement These have been rolled out across the clinical sites to help clarify the options available for students needing to escalate issues, or needing additional support

In conjunction with the other Victorian medical schools, we have officially launched the Victoria-wide medical student mental health study - aimed to examine the protective and risk factors contributing towards medical student mental health in Victoria We hope this will inform what needs to be done to improve medical student mental health in future years

Other

On the financial side of things, we ’ ve secured a scrubs sponsorship with AIRMed, thanks to our 2022 and 2023 sponsorship officers, Yash, Eric, Zoe and Jasmine After many years of looking into financial divestment, we are excited to announce that we have made the move on opening an account with Bendigo Bank (fossil-fuel free), and will have all our assets transferred by the end of 2023.

We recognise the tangible benefits that can come from empowering students to give back to the medical student community As such, we introduced a student grants program this year, aimed at providing funding towards student-led initiatives 3 projects have been funded so far this year, and we hope you enjoy the events and initiatives they put on for you

As a student union, you deserve to know what our processes look like We’ve aimed to maintain transparency with all of you through our monthly graphics with our minutes, committee member reports, and updates on what we have actioned based on the anonymous feedback form.

Thank you!

This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list of all that has been accomplished this year, and is instead a brief foray into the work of our team of 75 passionate MUMUS committee members. Stay tuned on our socials every month to read up on what each of your representatives gets up to in their roles

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any feedback, questions, ideas for a new event or initiative, or points of advocacy. I would love to hear from you!

By Jessica Yu - MUMUS President 2023