The Santos Dumont Institute (ISD) and the Rio Grande do Norte State University (UERN) have signed a cooperation agreement to create a program for training medical students that will combine clinical practice with scientific research. Over the course of twelve weeks, eight UERN students will be able to choose to spend time at the Institute. The activities will be carried out in an integrated manner at the two ISD units located in Macaíba (RN): the Anita Garibaldi Center for Education and Research in Health (Anita) and the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience (IIN-ELS), and will focus primarily on the area of neurology.

The Director General of ISD, Reginaldo Freitas Júnior, highlighted the importance of the partnership for strengthening public universities, ensuring integration between research, teaching and extension. “The new partnership with UERN, in addition to expanding our frontiers in medical education in Rio Grande do Norte, signifies ISD’s commitment to strengthening public universities, to the integration of teaching, research and extension, and to the social responsibility that every teaching and research institution in our country must effectively exercise. The doctors in training at UERN will be very well received in our home, with the hope that they will also be multipliers of the mission that we value so much,” he said.

The students, who must be in the internship phase to join the program, will go through three of the ten specialized care lines linked to the ISD Specialized Rehabilitation Center (CER ISD): Parkinson's Disease, Adult Spinal Cord Injury, and Drug-Resistant Epilepsy. “We designed an outpatient schedule, and the clinics in which they will be involved are fully related to some research in progress. The idea is that they go through the laboratories with research as the guiding thread of this outpatient experience, so that they can develop clinical reasoning and research reasoning,” says Samantha Maranhão, Coordinator of Health Education Activities at ISD.

ISD has two pioneering programs in Brazil: the Multiprofessional Residency in Healthcare for People with Disabilities and the Master's in Neuroengineering, in which research related to the topics covered by the institution's lines of care is developed. Through scientific and health education actions, the institution seeks to be critical and reflective, with practices linked to research to promote expanded care and new scientifically based practices and approaches.

Adjunct professor at UERN and neurosurgeon preceptor at ISD, Hougelle Simplício emphasizes that the main aspect of the cooperation is that students will be able to develop broad clinical reasoning through contact with various professionals in the health area, such as physiotherapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists and psychologists, in addition to contact with medical preceptors and scientific research. “Students will also be able to see how knowledge in the medical area that they will use in the future, applied research, is developed. They will see everything from applied research with people to how this research emerges in computational models, animals and in laboratories,” says Hougelle Simplício.

The ISD already has agreements with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), through which it receives students from various health courses at the Natal Campus, the Trairi School of Health Sciences (Facisa) and the Caicó Multicampi School of Medical Sciences (EMCM). “We understand that we have an educational role in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, especially in the health area. This partnership with UERN expands our strength in education for the state. UERN has very important health courses and, as an educational institution, we are interested in establishing agreements with public institutions that are developing this type of training,” says Samantha Maranhão.