Welcome to the department of Family and Community Medicine and Behavioural Sciences. We hope that through your journey with us, you will find our holistic approach to healthcare intellectually stimulating and rewarding. Our teaching methodology emphasises on building strong interpersonal and communication skills, multidisciplinary team approaches, and formulating patient's difficulties utilising the biopsychosocial model of care. In family and community medicine, as well as in psychiatry and behavioural sciences, we understand disease and illnesses in a broader context, and hence look at the whole body, the outside influences on the patient, and the stressors that factor into illnesses. We pride ourselves that our educational programmes train tomorrow's doctors to build healthier community through continuous, comprehensive, cost-effective, family-cantered healthcare.
We use diverse learning modalities including clinical Problem-Based and Team-Based Learning, direct bedside clinical teaching around the patients in health centres and hospitals, and in superb clinical skills laboratories as well as learning by doing community-based research projects. Our dedicated faculty including over many valued adjunct faculty members motivate students to be lifelong learners, to focus on health promotion as well as managing illness and to practice evidence-based healthcare.
Our department is actively involved in community services and each faculty member plays a crucial role in educating the local community through workshops, health campaigns and engagement with the media. We regularly run continuous professional development activities including faculty development workshops on teaching and learning in ambulatory care, evidence-based health care, patient safety and other aspects of medical education.
The department research interests include non-communicable diseases especially diabetes and asthma, mental health, epidemiological studies, medical education and health promotion. While our department is small in size, our ambition is unlimited. We constantly look for opportunities to build on our strong research collaborations to establish further partnership projects with esteemed local and international academic institutions.
We sincerely welcome you to our department, virtually and physically. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you need to discuss any issues related to the work we do in education, research, clinical activities and community service.
Hamid Alhaj, MD, PhD, MRCPsych, CCT (UK), PGDip
Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine and Behavioural Sciences
Email: halhaj@sharjah.ac.ae
