Teddy Bear Hospital

“Teddy Bear Hospital” is a project for children ages four to seven in which they visit Ghent University Hospital with their school to learn more about doctors and hospital environments. They do this together with their teddy bears. The children have the opportunity to care for their teddy bears at the teddy bear hospital, together with healthcare students. By letting the children play the role of the doctor, we try to reduce their fear of doctors, ambulances, and dentists. All of this takes place in a playful and interactive way. At the end of the visit, the children even get the opportunity to explore an ambulance from the Belgian Red Cross.
Schools attend either during the morning or afternoon, allowing volunteer students to register for half-day shifts. No advanced medical knowledge is required, so every student can participate as a volunteer. We do ask to follow a communication lecture on how to interact with children.
For medical students, Teddy Bear Hospital is a valuable opportunity to improve communication and interaction with children in a medical setting. Above all, the enthusiasm, curiosity, and creativity of the children make it an incredibly rewarding experience.

Meer dan Kanker

With this project, BeMSA Ghent aims to provide more context to the word “cancer.” We try to create a more complete understanding of life with and after cancer through a series of mini-documentaries based on interviews.
For our first edition, we will focus on childhood cancer. We will create four short videos, each exploring a different perspective:

• Paediatric cancer patients
• Former patients
• Family and friends of young cancer patients
• Healthcare professionals in the paediatric oncology department

In this way, we aim to offer support to children and their families going through a similar struggle by sharing their experiences. At the same time, we hope to raise awareness in the broader public about what such a journey truly involves and its impact on life after cancer.
We will also visit the paediatric oncology ward together with medical students to organise a fun activity for the patients.

Iedereen Gezond

Why the project ‘Iedereen Gezond’?

Healthy food and a healthy lifestyle are things that everyone should be introduced to from an early age. They have a huge impact on children’s development. Too often, children are still given a cookie instead of a piece of fruit, and they are not aware at all of what healthy nutrition actually means. With this project, we want to make children aware of healthy eating, as well as healthy habits such as exercise and oral hygiene, so that as they grow up they will pay more attention to their impact.

How do we want to do this?

As BeMSA Ghent, we aim to teach children in an interactive way about all possible topics that can contribute to a healthy lifestyle. We do this at the request of several schools in Ghent with a highly multicultural student population. In recent years, this has included primary school Victor Carpentier (located in a disadvantaged neighbourhood) and the secondary OKAN school Toren Van Babel. In schools with a multicultural background, children and their parents often have many things on their minds, meaning that healthy nutrition is often less of a priority.

Concretely, Iedereen Gezond is a project in which a number of medical students go to a primary school in Ghent to teach children in a fun way about healthy eating, exercise, oral hygiene, sleep habits, and more. They play games, cook tasty recipes, and exercise through play with the children. This is not only educational for the children, but also helps you as future doctors to develop important communication skills: being able to explain things in an understandable way to all groups in society, with this project specifically focusing on children. After all these fun activities, we eat our delicious creations together with the children.