Melanin Medics is 1 years old! Can you believe it! Time really does fly when you’re doing what you love.
I’m incredibly excited to write this blog post as we reach our 1 year mile stone. A year ago, I would never have imagined that we would have reached such amazing heights in the short space of a year. Witnessing the growth of this amazing platform has been such a grateful privilege and we can only hope that the next few years see much more than this. In this post we wanted to share out achievements in the past year; from beginning just as a blog to becoming a fully fledged organisation, we are very grateful for the support we have received and for the opportunity to impact those around us. So sit back and enjoy the read! Rumour has it that there’s an exciting announcement at the end of this post!
After running Melanin Medics by myself for 8 months I decided it was time to expand in order to further meet our objectives and establish us as an organisation. Now we have an amazing team of 15 passionate African-Caribbean Medical Students and Doctors from all around the UK.
We held our 1st ever event in Manchester on the 23rd of June for prospective African-Caribbean medical students with the University of Manchester African-Caribbean Medics Society. This event was a great success and we are very grateful to whole who came and to the doctors and medical student volunteers.
The Melanin Medics blog has become a popular resource and has been viewed almost 20000 times in the past year in over 90 different countries! We now have a team of writers, who all bring their own unique spin on writing and we hope you have enjoyed reading these posts just as much as we have enjoyed writing them. If you are interesting in writing blog posts for the blog, contact us: melaninmedics@gmail.com
Our Social Media pages collectively have amassed over a 1500 followers and features things like ‘A Day in the Life Of…’, Medical MCQ’s, Question of the Week, Giveaways, Advice and Motivation. If you’re not following us already then what are you waiting for? Give us a quick follow: @melaninmedics (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & LinkedIn).
As the deadline for Medicine Applications drew nearer in the months of September and October, I took a decision in the spur of the moment to review personal statements of prospective African-Caribbean Medicine applicants for free. This was an incredibly daunting decision and we received far more personal statements than pre-anticipated but I am so grateful we did it. It was truly a success as a number of those we have helped have gone onto receive offers from Universities such as Cambridge and Nottingham to study Medicine.
We were also incredibly pleased to have received an esteemed recognition from the British Medical Association (BMA). Furthermore, we received an additional mention from the BMA in a “Consultation response: A draft health care workforce strategy” article under section five. which recognised our efforts in widening participation of communities amongst others. We’re thrilled to be represented on the panel at the ‘Creating a turning Point on Race Equality in Medicine‘ BMA Summit this July.
We have successfully established a Mentorship Programme for prospective African-Caribbean Medical students which launched in April and we now have over 70 mentees and mentors participating in this programme. We look forward to sharing the progress and success stories with you with regards to their participation of this programme.
Since the beginning of March of 2018 we commenced our “Widening access to Medicine” School Outreach initiative. Our team have contacted schools within the community in order to engage with students of African-Caribbean descent and to expand their knowledge on pursuing Medicine.
At the start of March 2018, we also launched the Doctor’s Network. We are amazed to announce that we have over 60 African-Caribbean Medical Doctors as part of our Network. We highly appreciate you for your support and hope to continue to expand upon our connections. Through the Doctor’s Network we have been able to facilitate work experience opportunities for prospective Medical Students and connect Medical Students with Doctors according to their speciality of interest. Also we hope to establish a platform where Medical Doctors can easily network and offer methods of support for one another as they please. Which brings us onto our exciting announcement… *Drum Roll*
Our Next Event! Click here for more information
So if you’ve made it this far to the end of this post, I would just like to say a huge thank you! Thank you for sticking by us and supporting this platform, we are incredibly grateful and wish you all the best in the future. We have some more exciting things on the horizon which we look forward to sharing them with you, so stay tuned!
Written by Olamide Dada