A team of RCSI students and staff has won Student Project of the Year for the ICHAMS (International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students) conference at the Irish Healthcare Awards, held in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin on Thursday, 7 November. Congratulations to all the RCSI students involved!

Commenting on the award, Professor Hannah McGee, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, RCSI, said: "As Dean, I am proud of this enormous achievement by our students. The success of the ICHAMS conference is a testament to our students' abilities and innovative foresight and enables the type of collaboration that RCSI espouses. The ICHAMS Committees of 2011, 2012 and 2013 represent vision, dedication, hard work and an ambition to reach out to learn from and engage with others in similar healthcare training careers. Their success augers well for our future classes of graduating doctors, pharmacists and physiotherapists - and makes us, as staff, proud as an RCSI community."

ICHAMS (International Conference for Healthcare and Medical Students) is an RCSI student initiative - it is an undergraduate scientific conference for students by students that gives them insight into the translation of research from the bench to the patient's bedside.

About ICHAMS
In late 2010, ICHAMS was first proposed by undergraduate medical students Melissa Loh and Hatem Ghorab to Dr Sarah O'Neill, Director of the RCSI Research Summer School. The proposal was supported by the offices of the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences and the first conference happened in 2011. An undergraduate student committee organises the conference each year. The conference programme is planned to accommodate across healthcare groups such as medicine, pharmacy and physiotherapy. The programme includes a series of oral and poster presentations by undergraduate students which are judged by RCSI faculty and research staff. Prizes are given for the top oral and poster presentations.

A number of workshops are also provided. These are broadly categorised as Research, Career or Interactive. They are designed to provide students with various options of creative, up-to-date and interactive learning experiences for their future career as a healthcare professional. Key-note speakers are carefully selected from both international and local settings to allow students engage with professionals who are innovative leaders in their own fields of expertise. The committee also works hard to secure sponsorship from external agencies which include Kaplan, the Health Research Board (HRB), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Medical Protection Society (MPS), the Irish Network of Medical Eduactors (INMED), Fáilte Ireland and Astellas. BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com), an open access publisher, was chosen to publish an online version of all successful abstracts presented at the 2011, 2012 and 2013 conferences.It is through this website potential presenters submit their abstracts which undergo a rigorous review process. Only those abstracts of sufficient quality are accepted for presentation.

The organising committee formed partnership with other international student conferences such as ISCOMS (International Student Congress of (Bio) Medical Sciences), YES (Young European Scientist), ECS-Berlin (the European Students' Conference) and AMSA (Asian Medical Students' Association) to interact and exchange information on healthcare research. The committee uses the ICHAMS Facebook page to provide information and maintain links with previous delegates. ICHAMS also provides fun and relaxing opportunities to network with peers from all over the world through the ICHAMS Dublin Walking Tour, Opening Reception and Gala Dinner.

The inaugural ICHAMS had over 160 undergraduate healthcare students from 55 universities and 25 countries such as the United States, Sri Lanka, the Ivory Coast, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom attended the conference. Over 100 students presented a wide variety of healthcare research. This year's tag line was ‘Explore, Evolve, Excel - Advancing Biomedical Research' and the meeting was equally successful. Excellent conference attendance numbers, in many instances supported by students' home institutions, signals the perceived need, value and quality of the events offered. In addition to the explicit research-focused objectives of the originators, the process of learning how conference organisation works (including peer evaluation, programme planning, sponsorship and programme delivery) has been an excellent generic skills development process for the originators and for those subsequent student peers to whom the firs group have passed on the responsibility. It has been another way in which the conference concept fosters early career innovation and leadership skills.

Overall there were 20 winners announced at the 12th annual Irish Healthcare Awards short-listed from 116 applications. Thanks to Dr Sarah O'Neill, Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics, for providing leadership from a staff perspective.

ICHAMS Student Organising Team 2013:

•  Co-Chairs: Layveeniea Ananthan & Rebecca Horgan
• Communication Officer: Marina Yostos & Shu Ying Ho
• Public Relations Officer: May-Anh Nguyen & Nikita Rane
• Scientific Officers: Danielle Zimmerman & Vincent Healy & Jeffrey Nafash
• Workshop Officer: Poornima Menon
• IT Officer: Yasoda Subramanian
• Sponsorship Coordinator: Anna Wolinska & Sarah Fitzpatrick
• Events/Accommodation Officer: Daniel Creegan