Student presents at international conference

It’s rare for a 20-year-old undergraduate to be as experienced in the areas of asthma education and medical simulation technology as is Gunjan Gupta ’15. It’s rarer still for her to be accepted to give a presentation at an international health-care conference. But in late January of this year, Gupta presented her abstract as the lead author of “A New Approach to Asthma Inhaler Education Using Simulation Technology” at the 13th annual Society for Simulation in Healthcare Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Gupta, a chemistry major, has long had an interest in medicine. Early on, she zeroed in on medical simulation technology, a relatively new technique whose main purpose is to properly educate students in various fields through the use of high-technology simulators. Among reasons for the increased use of simulation technology for teaching and assessment are changes in health-care delivery, worldwide attention on medical errors and the need to improve patient safety, and the shift to outcomes-based education, with its requirements for assessment and demonstration of competence.

During the spring semester, Gupta held an internship at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, where she participated in a research study that tests patients on their mastery of the use of asthma inhalers using an inhaler application that she helped create. Gupta is a co-president of Trinity’s Open Airways Club and was trained as an asthma educator in the Hartford Public Schools.