DN Interview with Helena Canhão - female leadership in the global health sector
Helena Canhão, the new DEAN of NOVA Medical School and coordinator of the CHRC, is the first woman to assume the position of Director of the Faculty of Medical Sciences and will oversee the change of the curriculum of the Medicine course.
“We have a college that turns 45 this year and I'm actually the first female director of the Faculty of Medical Sciences. But I think women will have more and more leadership positions and we will naturally reach these positions. NOVA University has nine faculties and three of them are led by women, I am the third, we already had the National School of Public Health and the Faculty of Law. We are looking to an increasing of women doctors. In my expertise area I was the first doctorate, I was the first aggregate and there aren’t that many women who are heads of service in hospitals either. It's a pride, above all, and an acknowledge of this opportunity that we have at university and college to play our role." – Helena Canhão said to DN.
Regarding the way Prof. Helena Canhão feels about training in health sectors and training in Medicine, she says that “the solution cannot be just increasing the number of doctors, but to guarantee a quality in the Medicine practise”
Regarding the new curriculum of NOVA's Medicine Course, Helena adds: “Our teaching methods are more focused on systems than on the curricular unit itself. Then we have something that we didn't have before and is little used in Portugal, which is a curriculum mapping tool, where we first define the main goals. We want a student at the end of the sixth year, when they have a master's degree in Medicine, to have these skills, this knowledge, and we have the curriculum mapping in which we know that in the first year, in the second semester, in class X, the student had access to a certain subject, then in the fourth year, had access to another one, and then we built a puzzle of what is our content about. And, therefore, the contents are designed according to the main goals we want and not the other way around. This is the curriculum change."
Read the DN full article here: https://www.dn.pt/sociedade/solucao-nao-pode-ser-so-aumentar-o-numero-de-medicos-e-ter-uma-medicina-de-qualidade-14514317.html