The 2-month community placement in IMU University‘s Student Dietetics Clinic (SDC) offers students an immersive, real-world experience as community dietitians. In this 21st-century landscape where adaptability, well-roundedness and teamwork are highly valued, students not only applied their dietetics knowledge, but also learned to translate it into accessible, culturally appropriate, and impactful messages tailored to the communities they served.

During the placement, four final year Dietetics with Nutrition students, Chen Pei Yee, Ho Ying Yuan, Khoo Ju Yen and Wee Yi Wen were given the opportunity to make a meaningful impact across diverse communities, including the PPR Community in Pantai Ria, the Deaf community, a virtual audience with international participants and even the geriatric community. Each student had the opportunity to take up a leadership role in the event, gaining hands-on experience in both internal team collaboration and cross-disciplinary partnerships. Working alongside peers from other programmes and IMU Cares, they successfully organised nutrition related activities and design educational materials suitable for each community.

In preparation for serving this community, students had to translate their dietetics knowledge—originally learned in English—into layman’s terms in Bahasa Malaysia. With the guidance of supportive clinical educators, Ms Alina Ita binti Azhar and Ms Soh Pheh Huang, as well as project supervisor Dr Farah Yasmin, they developed educational materials and nutritional risk assessment forms tailored to the needs of the PPR community. Recognising that awareness of dietetics was still limited in this community, the students began by introducing the importance of healthy eating as a foundation for a healthier life.

In this community project under IMU Cares, students contributed by conducting body composition screenings and malnutrition screenings for a total of 61 participants on 25 January 2025. Upon completing the assessments and analysing the results, each participant received education on the importance of achieving a healthy body mass index (BMI), fat mass, and muscle mass. A total of 13 dietetic referral letters were issued to individuals identified as at risk of malnutrition, recommending further assessment and dietary consultation either at the Student Dietetics Clinic (SDC) or, alternatively, through dietetics services at the nearest Klinik Kesihatan.

On 9 February 2025 (Sunday), students successfully delivered a healthy eating talk with content tailored to the community, along with a children’s nutrition games corner, as part of the IMU Cares’ Deaf Aware & Ready Health Carnival event in collaboration with Ms Lucy, President of JUPEBIM. The students simplified their dietetics knowledge into bite-sized bits, used appropriate visual aids in their slides, and kept the talk concise to better capture participants’ attention.

Gratefully, they received positive responses for the healthy eating talk as well the children’s nutrition games corner. Some participants had follow-up questions after the healthy eating talk, while some wanted to snap pictures of the slides. The SDC received a Deaf patient who required an individual diet consultation to help manage her medical conditions. Also, the children’s nutrition games corner had kids who actively participated in colouring and learning about healthy food, providing their parents with the opportunity to focus on the healthy eating talk as well as other health awareness talks and health screening booths.

Greatly motivated by the desire to make a positive impact on the community, the students proactively volunteered to bring knowledge on diabetes management into the virtual world—making it freely accessible to anyone, anytime, and anywhere.

This marked the first event of their campaign, titled “Diabetes Management in Older Adults through Nutrition.”

The students were inspired to focus on this topic due to the rising number of diabetes cases in Malaysia, particularly among older adults.

Since it was their first time, there were multiple challenges to overcome, such as the complexity of delivering this educational topic virtually, conducting an inclusive trilingual session to reach a wider audience, using a lesser-known platform among the elderly to conduct the talk in breakout rooms, Q&A and lucky draw sessions.

However, the main challenge was to promote the talk through social media posts, street interviews and promotions during community activities.

It was a very new experience, designing interactive slides with interesting analogies to explain carbohydrate counting and practical tips to provide adequate nutrition to elderly adults with diabetes. On 1 March (Saturday), this community outreach successfully gained a total of 42 participants, with 30 participants in the English session and 12 participants in the Chinese session.

Overall, the students received positive feedback for the virtual talk, with 93.5% of participants rating the content relevance, presentation structure, slide effectiveness, and Q&A session as excellent in quality. Additional comments included: “Very informative,” “Please share the PowerPoint slides,” and “The analogy of using tokens for carbohydrate portions was very useful and easy to understand.”

The final event of the campaign aimed to educate elderly adults on managing their diabetes. During the community assessment, students discovered that half of the elderly residents at Rumah Victory had diabetes and lacked adequate knowledge in managing their condition. As a result, the campaign was tailored to address this need, under the title “Diabetes Management in Older Adults through Nutrition,” and was held on 3 March (Monday).

 The audience was much older and primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. To better engage them, the students redesigned and translated the content into Mandarin, incorporating fun and easy-to-understand visual aids. They delivered the educational content using a mix of Cantonese and Mandarin. An interactive activity, such as identifying foods with added sugar versus fibre-rich carbohydrate foods, was conducted. The team progressed quickly and effectively, working closely with the liaison from Rumah Victory, Mr Loo, for more relevant education and activities for the elderly.

This event had successfully invited up to 42 participants for the physical talk, solely conducted by all 4 Dietetics with Nutrition students, with each of them conducting 4 interactive activities with the elderly!

To conclude, these 2-month placement in IMU SDC was a unique chapter for the student’s learning journey to shape them into future dietitians. On top of all the events conducted, students developed an entrepreneurship mindset on how to operate the entire dietetics service business by themselves, with adequate guidance from their clinical educators and supervisor. This included independently completing administrative tasks, producing educational pamphlets, advocating dietetics related knowledge to the public through social media pages while prioritising patient’s consultations on a daily basis.

The students are grateful for these real-world learning opportunities, under supervision and tremendous amount of support with words of encouragement throughout the placement which has motivated them to attempt bigger and bolder goals.

Moreover, the students were trained daily to sharpen their skills in identifying patients’ nutritional issues through proper assessment and nutrition management for those visiting the centre. The students also enhanced their nutrition knowledge with weekly consolidation sessions that broadened their perspectives beyond standard nutritional guidelines. This gives them a unique holistic training like no other.

Additionally, this placement has fostered lasting friendships through close collaborations and peer learnings, clearer understanding of individual strengths and weaknesses through constant reflections, and most importantly, preparing them for the real world upon their upcoming graduation.

Here are some final thoughts on their experience from the 4 students:
We are deeply grateful for the invaluable learning opportunities provided by the IMU Student Dietetics Centre, where we engaged in meaningful, transformative community service. The hands-on experiences and development of both technical and soft skills at this training site have laid a strong foundation for our growth as competent, compassionate, and lifelong learning as future-to-be dietitians.

Written by Chen Pei Yee, Ho Ying Yuan, Khoo Ju Yen, Wee Yi Wen (IMU Dietetics with Nutrition students)