Faculty of Health Sciences

Hello friends, I am Professor Yurdanur Dikmen, Dean of Sakarya University of Applied Sciences Faculty of Health Sciences. Our Faculty of Health Sciences is one of the first faculties established with the establishment of our university in 2018. Faculty of Health Sciences is a faculty established in Akyazı district, approximately 30 kilometers away from Sakarya. Akyazı district hosts important resources such as spring waters, healing waters and most importantly hot spring waters. For this reason, it was thought that it would be very convenient to establish the Faculty of Health Sciences here. In our faculty, the Department of Nursing, Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation, Department of Health Management, Department of Audiology and Speech Therapy continue providing active education. We know that health-related fields often require applied education. Therefore, in addition to the theoretical courses, practice, laboratory applications and clinical applications that we call hospital practice should be done twice as much as the theory related courses. Among our departments, especially Nursing and Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation departments are more intensive practice-oriented departments. Therefore, these departments should have not only theoretical courses, but also laboratories and workshops where students can improve their professional skills. Therefore, our faculty students will have more intensive practice or clinical practice courses after the second year, especially in the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation and Nursing departments. In order to provide these trainings, we have theoretical classes and appropriate computer laboratories. In addition, we have skill laboratories that we planned out as a virtual hospital environment for our two departments, which I just mentioned, where students can reinforce the applications by making them safer and more comfortable, thus enabling them to grasp the the real clinical environment with higher self-confidence. We have 3 skill labs in the Nursing Department. In these skill laboratories, we have patient care simulators, multifunctional advanced arm and hip models, baby models, heart resuscitation training models that we call CPR. In addition, we have exercise and wellness laboratories for the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Department, where procedures such as electro-therapy, manual therapy, heat and hydrotherapy are applied or can be applied to patients. Communication is a very important issue in the field of health. As we can see in the media, sometimes misunderstandings or communication accidents occur between patients, their relatives and healthcare personnel. For this reason, as we aim to train qualified healthcare professionals as a faculty, we attach great importance to communication as well as skill. Based on this, we established a communication laboratory where our departments in our faculty can benefit from, and where students can see the cases of communication in practice as well as theoretical courses. Here, we aimed to transfer information to our students through an experience-based model by showing small case examples of the most common accidents in communication, accompanied by our expert teachers. Not only individual studies, but also group studies that aim to solve problems by brainstorming are a part of this training. Our ultimate goal is to train individuals who can benefit society and who can minimize communication accidents.
While establishing our academic staff structure in our faculty, we think of the aim of the Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, which is integrating knowledge with skill. The most important feature of our lecturers is that they have a lot of experience because of course knowledge is important, but experiences have a very important effect on transforming it into a skill. Therefore, we have an experienced and academically expert academic staff. We have different departments related to health in our faculty. However, we know that healthcare is all about team work. Each person within the team has a different job and responsibility. As a part of this duty, they are obliged to deliver health services to individuals. Based on this, we have a Multidisciplinary Team elective course that brings our students from different departments of our faculty together in the last year and aims to provide an understanding of a multidisciplinary team. In this course, which is given in the last year, we aim to give a case to our students by working as a team in accordance with their field and within the limits of their duties, so that they learn to work as a team. It is very important for us that our students gain this team understanding before they graduate. However, particularly in the Department of Nursing and Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation, we are implementing the 7 + 1 model, an important educational model of the university, pioneering it in Turkey. When our students in the Department of Nursing and Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation reach their final term, they have the opportunity to do a full-time internship for one semester in their fields. Thus, we aim for them to graduate in a more qualified manner.
The Faculty of Health Sciences was established in the Akyazı Campus. Healing waters and hot spring waters are very important here. In addition, I would like to touch upon an important issue such as health tourism, which has been very important in the world and in our country. Because we want to contribute to health tourism as a faculty. For this purpose, we have an intensive English education in our current curriculum, especially in our Nursing and Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Departments. When we look at other faculties, I think this is an important advantage for us. Our students will start to learn basic English in the first year in a way that will be more effective, especially in the field of speaking. In the second grade, they will take basic English, this time in the form of dialogues, in a practical sense, again mainly speaking. In the 3rd and 4th grades, they will take English lessons from their professors in their field, in the form of case studies, within the scope of Professional Applied English Courses. For this reason, I can say that our faculty has an intensive English program. The fact that our faculty has an intensive English curriculum, that we have professional skills and communication laboratories in our university, which aims to integrate skill with knowledge, and our aim to transform knowledge into a skill very quickly will be an important factor for students to choose us. We invite students who care about having an experienced expert staff coming together from different fields, which we call multidisciplinary, to create a stronger and more expert staff, and want to become health personnel, to be with us, and we ask them to choose from the departments of our faculty. While preparing our curriculum during the establishment phase of our faculty, the support and suggestions of the sector were especially important to us. Because we attach great importance to keeping in touch with the industry. Therefore, cooperating with us in line with the needs of the sector and concerning the issues the sector deems important in increasing the quality of education and training included in the curriculum is important. This is reflected in the quality of education. Health is one of the most important needs of societies from past to present. Health is a very important asset. Therefore, if you want to take part in the healthcare team that provides health services, if you want to receive training in the field of health and serve there, I invite you to shape your career together