This coming Monday (May 29), students from sixteen medical universities from all over Poland will come to Katowice. It is on this day that the fifth edition of the National Competition of Physiological Knowledge Great Synapse 2023 will begin! This year the host of this prestigious event is the Silesian Medical University in Katowice.
- Human physiology is a field that focuses on understanding the mechanisms and processes that sustain life and enable our functioning in the environment. Physiology studies both physical and chemical processes that occur in organisms at the cellular, tissue, organ and whole organism levels. The primary goal of physiology is to understand how organisms regulate their functions in response to changing environmental conditions, internal signals and needs, says Tomasz Sawczyn, MD, of the Department of Physiology at the Faculty of Medical Sciences in Katowice, Poland, and adds: - Physiologists study various aspects of the functioning of organisms, such as heart function, respiration, digestive function, the nervous system, the endocrine system, metabolic processes, electrolyte balance, thermoregulation, muscle function, sensory perception and much more, combining basic knowledge with clinical science. Thus, there is no more important field of study in the course of medical studies than physiology.
It is with such extensive and interesting material that the participants of the Great Synapse will grapple. The competition is aimed at medical students of all Polish medical universities. From among the second-year medical students in the course of an internal physiology knowledge test, a team of three is selected to represent their university in individual and team struggles during two days of fun with physiology. This year sixteen teams, 48 students, entered the competition organized by the Department of Physiology of the Silesian Medical University in Katowice. All medical universities in the country have been invited to the competition. On the first day, the participants in the individual competition will solve test tasks to determine the best ten students, who will compete in the next stage of yes/no questions, asked by the presenters of the struggle. The aggregated scores from both parts will determine the top three winners. On the second day of the competition, teams of three will face medical tasks prepared at the Center for Medical Didactics and Simulation. Clinical physiology tasks have been prepared at five stations. What counts on this day is both factual knowledge and manual preparation to perform a number of basic tasks that future doctors will encounter in their daily professional practice. Winners of the individual and team competitions will be rewarded with great prizes funded by a grant obtained from the Metropolitan Science Support Fund.
The two-day competition is also an unusual opportunity for a social meeting of both students and academic staff from all units in Poland that deal with human physiology in practice, and as experience shows, most interesting ideas and projects are born on the strength of direct contact.
Great Synapse, as a cyclical event, is organized every year at a different university and arouses keen interest in the academic community. There is a high probability that in future editions the competition formula will also be extended to other medical faculties, i.e. nursing, emergency medicine or physiotherapy. It promises that each year there will be more participants, which we are very pleased about.
The project: "Fifth National Physiological Knowledge Contest - Great Synapse" has been subsidized by the Upper Silesia-Zagłębi Metropolis within the framework of the Program "Metropolitan Fund for Support of Science" in 2022-2024 #MetropolisScience.
