Volunteer
Community volunteers are essential to the MD Program, helping our medical students become skilled, caring, and compassionate practitioners.
The MD Program at the University of Alberta values the support we receive from members of the community. Community support for our volunteer opportunities allows our medical students the ability to work towards their full potential as skilled practitioners during their training.
At different times of the year, there may be opportunities for community members to volunteer in the MD Program.
This program is important because it allows medical students the opportunity to learn from the patients that they will one day treat. These mentors will give our medical students a better understanding of the experience of living with illness and disability in a way which will help improve patient care.
The program is two years in length, beginning in the Fall each year, and requires 5-6 mentor/mentee visits. These visits are meant to be in-person, though online visits can be arranged at the discretion of the mentor.
If you feel you or someone you know is right for this program, please sign up by visiting bit.ly/
The University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry is dedicated to providing comprehensive and in-depth 2SLGBTQ+ education. We understand the importance of hearing the lived experiences of our community and are recruiting participants to tell us about their experiences. The Share Your Story event gives students the opportunity to learn about the healthcare experiences through 2SLGBTQ+ lived experiences.
If you feel that you would like to share your story with our students you can sign up at bit.ly/md-your-story or contact us with further questions at yourstory@ualberta.ca.
Standardized patients (SPs) play an important role in health sciences education across all disciplines. A Standardized Patient is a person who has been trained to accurately and consistently portray an actual patient at a particular point in time; the SP presents with the patient's history, personality, physical finding, emotional structure and response pattern. Why not just use actual patients? While actual or 'volunteer' patients are sometimes used for training, their changing health status makes them unsuitable for situations that require objectivity and consistency. By using trained SPs, we can ensure that each student encounters the same 'patient', allowing for more consistency in training, learning and assessment.