This September a unique for Russia network educational programme Elite Medical Education allowed fourth-year students of SSMU to begin their study at the Institute of Economics and Management of TSU. TSU teachers will help future medical leaders develop entrepreneurial thinking and teach them project management skills.

TSU experts teach five subjects, including Modern management technologies, Marketing in medicine, Personnel management, Production systems, and Budgeting. This academic year, students of SSMU began the course of Modern management technologies in the medical field, which will allow them to apply flexible and adaptive organisational structures in management, as well as design effective business models.

- The launch of this programme proves that TSU is ready to address the requests coming from the real sector. Together with SSMU, we are starting to train specialists who will not only be competent in the medical field, but also professionally trained in economic and managerial fields, commented Eduard Galazhinsky, the rector of TSU.

Olga Kobyakova, the rector of SSMU, also noted that the Elite Medical Education programme will allow students to navigate through the variety of opportunities that exist today and make a qualitative leap in their professional development:

- Someone dreams of becoming an outstanding scientist, someone sees himself as a health care manager, and someone is going to create a medical start-up. All these ambitious goals are achievable if the graduate has a serious basic medical education, strengthened by skills, such as emotional intelligence, teamwork, time management, and others. This high level of education will be provided thanks to the network training of students in three universities SSMU, TSU, and TPU.

Anastasia Efimova, a student of the program, is sure that the ability to go beyond standard thinking and acquire new skills and competencies is strengthened by the fact that the program is a network.

- I consider communication with teachers from TSU a valuable experience. We have only had a few lessons and already managed to look at many things, such as economic processes, modern management technologies, from different perspective - adds her colleague Alexander Galantsev.