How to inspire the next generation of students about the big topics

By Michael Head and Jessica Boxall, Clinical Informatics Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine

Universities, including Southampton, often offer ‘taster days’ to secondary school students. This includes topics such as medicine, essentially exposing them to what life as a doctor is really like, and to give them reflection on whether studying medicine might indeed be for them. However, there are few pre-university courses that cover other high-profile topics, for example global health.

With Covid-19, global health was thrust into the front line as a ‘Big Topic’ about which everyone needed to gain some understanding. By priming the next generation of scientists, researchers, healthcare workers and advocates around the key issues of today and tomorrow, we can support and inspire school and college students with their choices when applying to university.

The University’s LifeLab facility has been running since 2008, and teaches young people how their actions affect not only their own health, but also that of their future children. In August 2023, LifeLab and University colleagues delivered a one-day training session around global health. This pilot was free to attend, aimed at 16 to 17-year-olds, and advertising was sent to our network of local schools and colleges. All 20 places were quickly snapped up.

The course included research presentations and interactive sessions. We presented around food insecurity and the impacts of climate change upon health, including a case study from our own research in rural Ghana.  We also discussed maternal health in Ghana with particular emphasis on quality of birthing care at health facility level. The students were keen to know the motivation behind the research and also asked about data-collection methods, field visits and the impact of the research. It was interesting to hear them question whether the findings are made available to improve maternal health in Ghana, and thus how our own teaching to them can reinforce the importance of research impact.

Other topics included vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine activism during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as our refugee health research, covering both Ukraine and Burkina Faso refugees. Additionally, UoS Visiting Academic, Yasir Essar (an Afghanistan scientist, who fled the Taliban and ended up a refugee in Kazakhstan), joined virtually to give the students a personal insight about life in Afghanistan, the upheaval his family faced when leaving their country and his ambitions for a career in public health to help the Afghan people.

The interactive activities included the simulation of a gastrointestinal infectious disease outbreak, where some students were “cases”, others were public health staff trying to find the cases and one student was on data-entry duty. There was a predicted amount of chaos with finding cases (who we sent into different rooms within LifeLab, and some were later “reinfected” or became new cases in a second wave) and delays with data entry as we sought to show how difficult and confusing outbreak management can be. Another interactive activity covered students dividing into small groups and investigating malnutrition in a rural Ghanaian community. There was also a global-health pub quiz to finish up (which was very well received!).

Students were asked to provide feedback, and this proved to be very useful. They rated the educational value of the day, which received an average score of 4.55 (range 3-5), how much they enjoyed the course (average 4.36, range 3-5) and whether they were more or less enthusiastic about a career in global health having attended the training (average 3.91, range 3-5). The attendees had all chosen to be there, so had an initial curiosity about global health – thus their perceived enjoyment and encouragement from the day was pleasing to see and suggested the sessions were interesting overall and pitched at the right level.

We did ask if there were any topics that should not be run again in their current format, and six students mentioned the outbreak activity, suggesting it needed “more of a point to it”. This is useful feedback and, on reflection, we could lengthen that session and set the students questions to answer around the data they had collected (for example, odds ratios and significance testing to identify risk factors).

Overall, it appears the students enjoyed and appreciated the day. The areas of criticism are fair and appropriate and give us cause for reflection. Our view is that we would like to offer this course again, potentially over two days and to include further skills sessions (such as developing presentation skills). The course may also be pitched at younger students, such as year 8 or year 9, who are looking to choose their GCSE options.

Ultimately, we need to consider how best to inspire the next generation of STEM students. This is good for the future of global health, and good for raising the profile of University of Southampton with future generations of potential students.

See also our Times Higher Education article about this topic – https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/case-study-developing-next-stem-generation