SZŠ a VOŠZ Plzeň (Coordinator School)

Secondary medical school and the College of Higher Medical Education in Pilsen has been providing high quality professional medical education for more than 70 years. Our school belongs to the largest schools in the Pilsen region and ranks among the largest regional medical schools in the Czech Republic. 
      Currently, there are 523 pupils at the secondary school and 351 students at the college. The tuition is provided by 170 highly qualified internal and external teachers. In the context of professional practice, we cooperate with the most health care facilities in the Pilsen region and with many other outside it. Our main partners are the Teaching hospital Pilsen, Mulač’s hospital Pilsen, Privamed hospital Pilsen, municipal charity, Children's centre and a number of other state and private medical facilities. We have a very good material base –  modern training classrooms equipped with audio-visual equipment and a number of specialised didactic teaching aids, well-equipped laboratories , ICT classrooms with Internet access, a lecture room, a study room with plenty of specialized literature and fiction. 
      The school has cooperated on a variety of projects with organizations from Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Malta, Germany, Poland, Austria, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey.  
      However, the current project is different from our previous projects in that it focuses less on the professional side and more on psychological issues that our students coming from different backgrounds are forced to face. There are numerous students who fail to adapt, partly because their being introvert, and partly because of the pressure that their peers put on them. Sometimes victims of discrimination succumb and drop out of school, taking up activities and habits which work to their detriment. Bullied students always crave to be accepted and end up thinking negatively of themselves. In the long run, this results in loss of self-esteem, self-confidence and can lead to depression, anxiety, inadaptability within adult communities. Therefore, the project cooperation is focused on fight against racism and xenophobia, prejudice of all types, lack of tolerance and acceptance of differences among people. Although we have been part of previous projects, we feel that this new project is a challenge both for us, the teachers, and for our students.
     The school is a part of a growing and relatively innovative international network of schools in different European countries fighting racism. It regularly hosts many foreign visiting students from Europe and USA, which we consider to be beneficial for the objectives of this project. Therefore, our students and staff already have the experience of dealing with students from other cultural backgrounds.