ASME July
31 July 2015
Earlier this month I travelled to Edinburgh on behalf of CUREMeDE to attend the ASME Annual Scientific Meeting, and to present a paper on our Broad Based Training (BBT) project. I was warmly welcomed to the Murrayfield Stadium and was just in time to catch Steve Peters presenting his ‘chimp paradox’ to an enthralled audience.
I was thrilled to learn that Ann Chu (currently a teaching fellow at Imperial) was awarded the Teaching Innovation and Excellence Award for her research on medical trainees’ views on the transition from core training to higher specialist training. It was great to see someone taking a qualitative interpretivist approach to exploring these issues: Ann’s presentation was both thought provoking and professional. I have had the pleasure of liaising with Ann earlier this year to collect data from trainee doctors as part of our ongoing BBT evaluation.
My own presentation titled ‘Broad Based Training: Findings from the Ongoing Evaluation of Pilot Initiatives in England’ sparked a lively debate about the role of ‘broad-based’ or ‘generalist’ practitioners in the existing health care system, and the implications of how this new programme sits alongside traditional postgraduate training programmes in terms of belongingness and professional identity development. We hope to return to the conference next year in Belfast to carry on this important conversation…
Other highlights included:
John Jenkins (on behalf of Vicky Osgood) exploring the changing role of the GMC and the shift from focussing on ‘bad’ doctors towards raising overall standards in medical education and training, based on the ideas in the 2010 Temple report that training is the best way to enhance patient safety.
Recipients of an Education Development Group innovator award - the Association of Elderly Medicine (AEME) showcasing how they are engaging with junior doctors to raise awareness of geriatrics as the biggest hospital based specialty. Those involved with AEME have developed an impressive suite of events and resources including a national Geriatrics for Juniors (G4J) conference flanked by smaller regional ‘G4J connect’ events and open access resources including Geriatric e-learning modules on YouTube and a care of the elderly podcast (COTECAST). The speakers had some important messages for other would-be innovators in medical education: it can be done on a limited budget by harnessing social media and by empowering grass roots activism.
Jill Thistlethwaite and Michael Ross (Editors of Clinical Teacher and Medical Education) gave some excellent and very practical advice on how to write journal articles on medical education for an international audience, and stressed that there is a growing appetite for papers on postgraduate and CPD education (which is great news for our BBT project which evaluates a new postgraduate training programme!).
Many thanks to the organisers for a stimulating and informative few days in a gorgeous setting.
