Issue 51
Aug 2024
STUDENT MATTERS
By Nathan Edward Lee Jian Liang, Koh Rae En Roxana, Wong Zhen Yun Megan, Teo Yu Zhe Justin, third year students, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
Today's healthcare professionals face increasingly profound challenges serving communities in need. With widening healthcare disparities and complex, dynamic social infrastructures, it is important for healthcare professionals in training to develop relevant transdisciplinary skills in creative, real-world problem-solving to meet the needs of marginalised individuals and communities, locally and globally.
At the heart of this service-learning programme is the humanitarian purpose of respect for human life, alleviating suffering, and maintaining human dignity through community-based interventions. The HHL Programme is designed to provide support and guidance for our students as they embark on planning and implementing student-led community service projects. With support from community partners, this programme provides platforms to nurture community-responsive and compassionate healthcare leaders of tomorrow.
HHL Programme strongly encourages local community service projects to explore the possibility of collaboration. Project 4PAWSitivity and Project Oliva are 2 examples of community service collaboration.
Motivation for collaboration
The idea of a joint initiative between Project 4Pawsitivity and Project Oliva began from a desire to raise awareness and be an advocate for Animal-Assisted Activities (AAA) to those who have not had the chance to experience it for themselves. As part of Project 4Pawsitivity’s ethos to promote AAA to all, including those from the neurodivergent community in Project Oliva, the collaboration involved organising AAA to provide neurodivergent individuals with an opportunity to interact with canines.
During the session, participants exercise emotional regulation, practise social skills, and experience sensory stimulation. Through these sessions, we hoped to contribute to the physical, emotional, and psychological development of neurodivergent individuals, fostering their inclusion and well-being within our society.
A successful first outing
The 4paws team during the first AAA session.
On 20 January 2024, Project 4PAWSitivity and Project Oliva held our first AAA session for our members in Me Too! Club (MTC), a programme under MINDS. Interacting with the dogs proved to be a big hit with our beneficiaries. While many started out shy and were hesitant to pet the dogs, they became more comfortable as the day progressed. After the session, many parents also noted that the participants were in a better mood—smiling, laughing and more chatty than usual.
AAA comes with its challenges. As a truly collaborative event, there are several stakeholders involved—namely the 2 Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) student-led community service projects, MTC, and AAI SG (a locally-based social enterprise that specialises in animal-assisted interactions and interventions). Coordinating various stakeholders’ schedules and all the logistics required of the event was challenging.
Growing the collaboration
Together with MTC, we decided that AAA was something we could incorporate as a core event in Project Oliva’s befriending calendar, thus opening the way for our befriending programme to grow.
However, as neurodivergent participants are less predictable than neurotypical participants, there is a need to select dogs that have gone through stringent training. This ensures that they can respond to commands or remain calm if a MTC member was over-zealous or too excited. Additionally, we would require funding for the support of AAI SG’s specialised services. This means that we would have to look into more fundraising avenues to cover the costs of this meaningful event.
Interacting with the dogs proved to be a big hit with our beneficiaries. While many started out shy and were hesitant to pet the dogs, they became more comfortable as the day progressed. After the session, many parents also noted that the participants were in a better mood—smiling, laughing and more chatty than usual.”
Project 4Pawsitivity
Project 4PAWSitivity is a local community involvement project started by NUS Medicine students in 2018. Project 4PAWSitivity’s passion stems from bringing comfort and healing to patients through the love and warmth animals give unconditionally. We seek to facilitate and integrate AAA into patient care within the local healthcare system. We believe AAA is able to aid the physical, emotional and psychosocial recovery of patients and even alleviate feelings such as loneliness and social isolation.
Our motto: ‘To love where words fail, and the heart speaks’, tells of when several of our senior medical students experienced the therapeutic and healing effects of being with the animals and later reflected on the beneficial effects the encounters had on the students’ mental wellness.
At the same time, our members recognised a gap in our local healthcare system where the purposeful employment of AAA to promote a person’s well-being was not as optimally utilised compared to countries in Europe or the US. This led to the formation of Project 4Pawsitivity, which seeks to educate existing healthcare professionals in hopes that AAA can be included in patients’ care plans, complementary to their conventional therapeutic management plans.
Over the years, we have come to see how many of those who were initially doubtful or skeptical of AAA’s benefits had to first experience a session of AAA for themselves before understanding the positive tangible effect the programme had. We hope that in the future, many more who are unsure of AAA’s potential would take the first step towards experiencing AAA for themselves, then share it with others.
Project Oliva
AY23/24 Project Oliva Committee.
Similar to Project 4PAWSitivity, Project Oliva is the only NUS Medicine community service project that works with the local neurodivergent community. Established in 2017, our motto is to bridge the gap between the neurodivergent and neurotypical communities.
In Singapore, there is glaringly little support for neurodivergent adults who have graduated from formal special needs education.
As such, we have chosen neurodivergent adults as our sub-focus and partnered Me Too! Club (MTC), a programme under MINDS.
The aim of MTC is to bring socially isolated adults with special needs into the community through an array of leisure and befriending activities.
Every month, Project Oliva committee breaks into small groups to conduct befriending sessions for the MTC members. To give members a sense of ownership, we tailor activities to the members’ interests and provide them with a chance to plan what they wish to do in each session. So far, we have groups that prefer arts and crafts, while others enjoy sports or cultural activities like visiting museums. As Project Oliva is a 2-year commitment for students, this programme builds meaningful and lasting friendships between our committee members and the MTC members within every group.
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