M4RD and Medscape Education Join Forces for ITN Rare Disease Film
Medics4RareDiseases is thrilled to partner with Medscape Education, a global education website for medics, to produce a film with ITN. The programme, that will be released on Rare Disease Day (28th February), focuses on the importance of rare disease education. It outlines M4RD and Medscape Education’s joint vision for a ‘one discipline’ approach to rare disease education, that is currently absent from most medical curriculums.
Filming took place at QMUL Medical School, where M4RD first started as a student society. It features interviews with our very own Dr Lucy McKay, CEO of M4RD, and Christy Rohani-Montez, PhD, Medscape’s Education Global Director of Clinical Strategy. Dan Jeffries, M4RD Trustee, author (and proud owner of two rare conditions) is also featured and provides invaluable patient perspective. We are proud to announce that the film also includes an interview with Sir Professor Mark Caulfield, who heads up the Queen Mary University of London’s Medical School. Sir Professor Caulfield is a long-standing advocate of rare disease research and education and has supported M4RD right from the start.
M4RD and Medscape Education jointly advocate the use of a ‘single discipline approach’ to teach the basics of rare diseases. This is currently absent from most medical curriculums and poses an ‘education gap’. The aim is to empower medical professionals with novel teaching and pragmatic tools to help suspect, diagnose, and manage rare conditions. The short film is part of a series of videos being produced in a joint collaboration between ITN and Genetic Alliance that will be released on Rare Disease Day, 28th February 2023.
‘With over 7000 unique rare diseases, learning each individually would be unfeasible. However there are vast commonalities between these conditions and the impacts they have on patients. Treating rare disease as an ‘umbrella term’, for education, highlights the similarities and shared factors that rare disease patients experience and helps addresses a current gap in medical education.’ – Dr Lucy McKay, CEO M4RD
“Approaches in rare diseases are evolving every day, and our goal is to help clinicians stay current through education. In medical school, physicians are told that when they hear hoofbeats, they should think ‘horses,’ not ‘zebras.’ We want physicians to understand that zebras are not as rare as they think.” – Christy Rohani-Montez, PhD, Global Director of Clinical Strategy, Medscape
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