College of pharmacy students continue to celebrate breast cancer awareness despite the pandemic of 2020. As future healthcare professionals, it is part of their responsibility to be advocates for their patients. The event this year was different in order to abide by the safety measures required to halt the spread of the virus.
The final year PharmD students organized a virtual walk in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness month called “ GMU Breast Cancer Awareness Challenge “ . The walk was powered by a relatively new app called Fitze, which is the UAE’s first-ever fitness rewards app. The Walk was designed in a way where it challenged the students of GMU to walk 30 thousand steps in 3 days and to spread awareness and advocate for breast cancer. On the 20th of October 2020, students downloaded the application and connected their activity tracker/smartwatch or the health app on their phones to the application, joined the challenge and began walking and spreading awareness on social media by using the hashtag #GMUwalksforapurpose.
By the 23rd of October, a total of 154 students had joined the challenge and walked a distance of 2.6k Kilometers (3.5M steps) in 3 days, which is roughly the distance between UAE to Lebanon in total for all students . For many of those who joined this challenge, it was about celebrating strength and survival and for some others it was about advocacy and a drive to educate their patients, friends and family about the realities of breast cancer.
Final year PharmD student Nahal commented: “We as future healthcare professionals have managed to take active steps not only in improving our own health, but also in contributing to a great cause.