An information session on the Harvard Medical School Portugal Program – Portugal (PHMS-PT) took place at the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (FMUL) on 25 May. This was one of the last visits to medical schools in Portugal carried out this month, and where the updated Program was announced. The new website containing information for citizens was presented, and information about scholarships for developing the website’s contents was given.

The topic of the talk was “Presentation of Online Health Information and Opportunities for Collaboration and Funding” and was attended by Professor António Vaz Carneiro, Co-Director of the Program, and by Professor Anthony Kamaroff, Director of HMS-PT.

Apart from giving a short description of the work that has been developed over the past year and a half, the purpose of the session was to disclose the contents already available and the resources used to create the program and make it available.

Accordingly, it was explained that the first step involved collecting a lot of content already available at Harvard. Step 2 was the translation of texts, the third was confirmation that the language was understandable by the public at large, which required adjusting values, numbers, statistics, and references to the Portuguese context, and the forth and last step consisted in evaluating and making a final review of the information by a group of senior reviewers.

In this first stage, contents are now available in the various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo). The next goal is to create the PHMS-PT website.

The session also aimed to inform participants how they can collaborate in the PHMS-PT and produce contents on public health information for the site. Information on how to apply for scholarships funded by Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and how projects are subsequently assessed by a panel of specialists and then published on the website was also transmitted.

This is how the first stage of PHMS-PT will draw to a close, opening doors to doctors, researchers and students in health sciences, and enabling them to contribute with texts that may subsequently be published.

Equipa Editorial
news@fm.ul.pt