President Armen Sarkissian gave a distant learning assignment to a group of students of the State Medical and National Polytechnic Universities: protect and defend doctors

President Armen Sarkissian applied today the distant learning method and through a videoconference for the third time gave a lecture to a group of students of the Yerevan Mkhitar Heratsi State Medical University and National Polytechnic University of Armenia.

The class lasted for 45 minutes during which the President spoke in particular about the connection between healthcare and technologies and said that throughout the history these two have always been existing side by side. “Medicine has always been linked to knowledge and information. Throughout centuries, healthcare or knowledge about it have been linked to registering positive and negative results and their storage. Technologies have always been promoted by medicine: healthcare formulated the problem while technologists, engineers, based on the results of scientific research, provided solutions.”

Not to break away from tradition, President Armen Sarkissian, like during previous classes with a group of students of the YSU Departments of Oriental Studies, Physics, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Mathematics and Mechanics this time too, tasked the students to do homework. “Physicians should think and present in the form of an article the biggest challenges we face, and second, present how they see the development of medicine in Armenia,” the President said. “These are general topics, but there is also the third one, which is very important. Let’s define the problem the following way: protect and defend doctors. In the current situation with the coronavirus, the greatest problem is to protect doctors. It is impossible to defeat this virus without doctors, but if doctors get infected and sick, we will have a huge problem. And it is a problem not only for Armenia.

There are multiple examples, the worst is Italy, where unfortunately doctors were not protected in time. They contracted virus and when people started to enter hospitals, they became the source of spread of the coronavirus.

How to avoid it? To get to a hospital a person should go through a certain process, to make sure that he or she is not infected. If a person has a chronic illness, hospitals need to have separate clinics so that doctors, who are isolated, can find out whether the person brought by an ambulance is sick or not. And only after that let them enter the clinic. Or, all doctors in the clinic should be separated, doctors need to keep social distance. But this is a simple model.

I want you to present your ideas on “Protect doctors” topic, while the engineers need to think how technologies can help in the fight against the epidemic.”

The President of Armenia noted that authors of the best papers would receive Presidential award.