By Noor Omar, Noor Amjad, and Tegan Smith (4th year medical students)
ARU medical students: “It was a great learning experience to contribute to the MigRefHealth project as part of our degree placement”
At ARU, to facilitate the synergy between healthcare, innovation and entrepreneurship, in the fourth year of their medical degree students undertake a Student Selected Component (SSC) that is informed by the Evidence-based Medicine theme on the degree. As part of the SSC, students are allocated to selected longitudinal supervised projects over six months. These projects are centred around quality improvement (including health inequalities), and innovation (including clinical research and entrepreneurship).
During the course of our Research SSC, from October 2024 to May 2025, we had the privilege of working alongside the East of England team which consists of Dr Eglė Dagilytė (academic lead for the mapping element of the project), Research Assistant Catherine Kennelly, and Professor Margaret Greenfields (the principal investigator) on a UKRI/AHRC-funded research project on health inequalities. The three-year project explores the use of community assets by refugee, asylum seekers and migrants in their daily lives, particularly looking at community assets in healthcare, food security, and housing, as well as via access to other services (legal, outside spaces etc). Our goal was to assist the project team with assigned tasks, including contributing to the data search and recording for a digital map that plotted the community health assets we had identified.
Our work began with a literature review, where Dr Eglė Dagilytė, the Project Work Package 2 Lead, and the two Project Researchers – Catherine Kennelly and Dr Runa Lazzarino – guided us in conducting advanced academic database searches and analysing grey literature from international and national organisations. This provided us with a strong foundation in research methods and critical analysis, which was further strengthened by the support we received from ARU Librarian Jane Shelley.
We also had the opportunity to participate – by aiding the booking-in process and taking notes – in two community forums (research focus groups, consisting of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants) in Colchester and Great Yarmouth. These sessions were incredibly valuable – not only did they improve our notetaking and communication skills, but they also gave us firsthand experience in how qualitative research is undertaken by engaging with diverse communities.
The literature searches and the empirical focus groups helped us build our expertise and confidence as future medical professionals. For example, we learned how to use Boolean operators to get relevant search results on various research databases and to use Microsoft Teams to share and edit documents in a professional environment. These skills we have gained here relate to our The General Medical Council (GMC; the UK medical regulator) “Outcomes for Graduates”. Specifically, the GMC outcomes 25 and 26 focus on applying the principles, methods and knowledge of population health and the improvement of health and sustainable healthcare to medical practice, and applying scientific method and approaches to medical research, respectively.
Another key part of our role was supporting the identification and geotagging of local assets (such as support services and community hubs) that could benefit refugees and migrants. We did this by finding the precise location of different assets on Google Maps and attaching geographical identification data, such as latitude and longitude coordinates, on an Excel sheet. This sharpened our data management and digital literacy skills, while giving us insight into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into research projects – these will be very useful for our future studies and careers.
Finally, we compiled our findings and information about our role in the study into a research poster, which we presented at the ARU Medical Students Conference in May 2025 to colleagues and supervisors. This was a rewarding chance to share what we’d learned and highlight the importance of the overall research being undertaken and the elements we supported.
Along the way, we enjoyed working as a team, face to face and through written and electronic means. This aspect of the project aligned with our GMC learning outcomes 8 and 9, which recognise the role of doctors in contributing to managing and leading health services and learning to work effectively within a multi-professional team.
While the poster was the end goal for our SSC, the research that was conducted is part of an overall project that will continue to be developed and built upon.
We look forward to seeing how this interesting project will evolve next!
