WISH focuses on nurturing local talents in healthcare

The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) has embarked on an ambitious mission of grooming local talents into innovators and policymakers in healthcare through its Young Innovators Programme.

In an exclusive interview with Gulf Times, a top official of WISH said that the Young Innovators Programme aims to nurture the local talents in healthcare and provide them necessary platform to showcase their innovations and findings.

“Our goal is to document what works and make sure that it reaches the attention of the local and global healthcare community. We do not finance any project but we document and showcase them,” said Egbert Schillings, CEO of WISH told Gulf Times.

Schilling said: “WISH, an initiative of Qatar Foundation, applies the same yardstick of merit and quality in everything, we do. We are visiting local schools and colleges and interact with students who are already in the field of medicine or those who plan to take up medicine.”

“We observe the participants and we judge those who enrol according to their statement and performance. We had about 8 participants in the programme in the beginning and some of them had some inconvenience. Now 5 of them are following the programme and working on their own innovations.” the official added.

The WISH CEO pointed out that the health of the population is the basis for a knowledge based society. “We are encouraging people to come here and conduct research. We are going to have collaborations with some of the local schools. Young Innovators programme is a health policy and research programme.”

Al Jawhra al-Mana, communications officer, WISH said that the programme was a great inspiration for the participants as they could showcase an app in the last WISH summit as well as participate in many sessions and interact with several global policy makers in healthcare.

“The participants of the programme presented the hugely appreciated patient experience app at the event. In addition they could take part in several sessions, ask questions and interact with global leaders.”

Two of the young innovators who took part in the WISH summit shared their experience and said that the interactions were highly enlightening for them.

Ahmed al-Qahtani, a student at Weill Cornell Medical College, Qatar (WCMC-Q) said that he has decided to become a policy maker in medicine rather than becoming a doctor. He explained: “The summit gave me a lot of ideas about the importance of policy matters in medicine. I can touch more lives of people by becoming a policy maker rather than becoming a doctor.”

Rebal Turjoman, another student from WCMC-Q and a participant of the programme, noted that he was more interested in working on patient safety. “It is not just creating something new but fine-tuning the system is all the more important. We also need to identify what can be preventable, different ways to tackle the existing health issues and how physicians can help patients better.”