Group run by academics from University of Bristol Medical School with an interest in Medical Education Research. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not of Bristol Medical School or the University.
In this blog Dr Sam Chumbley and Dr Ed Luff invite you to The Inaugural CTF Conference: TICC GW4, hosted by the University of Bristol in collaboration with BMERG.
TICC GW4 provides an opportunity to see and present the valued work of Clinical Teaching Fellows (CTFs) from across the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools of Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter. Building on the successes of last year’s Inaugural CTF Conference at the University of Bristol, which brought together CTFs from Bristol Medical School’s regional academies, we have expanded this year’s meeting, to invite presenters from the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter.
One of the highlights of this year’s expanded interinstitutional conference will be a keynote from Dr Jo Hartland, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Education Director at Bristol Medical School. They will be presenting an account of their work in the field of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
There will also be presentation options for CTFs from the GW4 Alliance, in a variety of formats, including Research, Innovation and Opinion Pieces. Authors can choose to submit abstracts for consideration as a Showcase presentation (20 minutes), Oral presentation (10 minutes), Poster presentation (3 minutes) or for display as an e-Poster, which requires no presentation on the day. Opinion Pieces can also be considered for an Open Forum (30-minute) platform of discussion. There will also be a variety of workshops run on the day, to help develop delegates’ research and clinical academic skills.
All those involved in the teaching or support of medical students, be that clinical, academic, or administrative, are welcome to attend the conference. However, presentations will only be open to Clinical Teaching Fellows from the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools.
Registration is free and lunch will be provided. TICC GW4 will be held in Bristol on the 5th of April 2024. Further details will be sent following registration.
To register for the conference or to submit your abstract for consideration for presentation at the conference, please follow this link: TICC GW4 Registration
Registration will close nearer to the conference date.
The deadline for submission of abstracts is 12:00 on Friday 8th March 2024.
This latest blog in our publishing series is a must read for all researchers, not just those in medical education.
In this blog research support librarian Kate Holmes will introduce you to Open Access publishing, why it matters, a few handy tools, and how it might influence where you decide to place your article.
Open sign by Viktor Forgacs (Unsplash)
You’ve decided you want to write an article. You’ve thought about your structure, maybe using some of the support and advice from this blog. Maybe you’ve even begun to think about where you’d like to place it. So, how might publishing Open Access influence the process?
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) is free, unrestricted online access to research outputs.
This means that anyone with an internet connection can read your work because it is available without someone having to go through a paywall or log into a system.
There are two common routes to Open Access:
Gold: where the library pays the publisher to make the article available on the publisher’s website free of charge to readers, with their formatting and copyediting.
Green: where you upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to an online data repository such as Pure for anyone to read. (This is the last word document you sent the publisher prior to copyediting and typesetting.)
The UK Reproducibility Network have a great introducing the open research practice of open access and why it is important:
Why do it?
Research Culture
Paywalls prevent people from reading your research because not every institution can afford to pay for subscriptions to every journal. This means that much of the research conducted is inaccessible to researchers who don’t have access to libraries with large budgets, such as those in the global south, or to patients who want to learn more about their own conditions.
Unsurprisingly, Open Access articles are read and cited more, allowing them to make more impact in the academic community and to interested parties, such as patients.
Choosing to publish Open Access means that you are participating in open research practices and a movement that aims to improve research culture. These practices improve research rigour by being as transparent as possible about how research is done.
Publishing Open Access is one element of open research; you can see it as the front door to wider open research practices.
Funder requirements
Publishing Open Access is required by some funders like the UKRI’s Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. These organisations provide funds to cover Gold Open Access costs for the research they have funded. You can find out if you can request these funds by contacting your institutions library and filling out an open access form (see also University of Bristol Article processing charge guidance).
If this is the case, your funder will commonly ask you to:
It is important that you include this information and that you publish your article Gold Open Access because this is a condition of their funding your work. Seek advice from your institutional OA team for the specific details of funder requirements so that they can help you understand them more (see also University of Bristol Open Access Policies). Note, not complying may lead to a funder blacklisting an institution or imposing financial penalties.
Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UKs system for assessing the quality and impact of UK research. We’re still waiting to hear exactly what the Open Access requirements are going to be for REF 2029. However, we currently need to ensure that we upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure within 3 months of its acceptance for the article to be eligible to be submitted as part of REF.
Many institutions, including Bristol, have developed policies to support researchers to make their work more accessible. At Bristol this is the University’s Scholarly Works Policy, which supports researchers to post the accepted version of articles to the online repository (Pure) in a way that meets REF and funder requirements. If you do not manage to upload your article in time, then there are sometimes ‘exceptions’ that can be applied, and your library team can help you with this.
What might this mean for choosing where you place your work?
Publishing Open Access benefits society and is part of your duty as a good researcher. The good news is that you can choose how your work appears by making choices about where you publish.
Although Green Open Access publication is great and can be cited in the same way as a journal’s formatted article, most people prefer to have a free version of their article available on the publisher’s website.
If you want this to happen, there are a couple of different routes you can take:
Diamond Open Access: no fees to authors or to readers, making all research free to read and free to publish. These journals are typically funded by libraries and scholarly organisations.
Gold Open Access: final published version of the research is made open access on the publisher’s webpage in exchange for a fee. If you don’t have funding, you can often still publish Gold Open Access (where the library pays a fee). As part of the journal packages your library buys for you to read, OA teams can make articles in certain journals Gold Open Access. These are known as ‘Read and Publish’ agreements. Your library will often have a directory where you can check whether the journal you are interested in is covered, e.g. UoB Read and Publish deal finder tool.
If you want to make the most of your research, then incorporate choices about Open Access into your journal selection process. That way, it can support you to communicate your research as widely as possible!
More author the blog author:
Dr Kate Holmes advocates for Open Access as a Research Support Librarian. She uses her experience in research to help academics understand more about the benefits of Open Access and the requirements they need to fulfil.
Have you seen our educator and researcher profile page? As part of our objective to ‘Innovate and Inspire’, this page is dedicated to showcasing not only the work of individuals working as educators and researchers in medical education at Bristol, but also a bit about their journey and their top tips for working in the discipline.
This month our featured educator is Dr Grace Pearson, a clinical lecturer and specialty doctor in Severn deanery.
Following her recent completion of a Ph.D. Fellowship in undergraduate education in geriatric medicine, Grace is actively innovating and evaluating geriatrics curricula on both local and national scales. This strategic approach ensures the continual enhancement of medical education in geriatric medicine.
To learn more about Grace’ Pearson’s work and that of other educators at Bristol Medical School, we invite you to explore their profiles on our BRMS Educator Profiles page.
In the second hot topics blog of 2024, Fiona Holmes considers the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary learning. The inspiration for this came from teaching Clinical Perfusion Science students (clinical scientists who operate the heart-lung bypass during cardiac surgery) who come from different disciplinary backgrounds (bioscience/bioengineering and nursing/ODP), and who learn together and from each other and work as part of a complex multidisciplinary team.
The World Health Organisation defines interdisciplinary learning (IDL) as ‘students from two or more professions learning about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes’ and has stated that ‘interprofessional education and collaborative practice can play a significant role in mitigating many of the challenges faced by health systems around the world’.
What are the benefits of IDL?
Shared knowledge. Healthcare students face careers in increasingly complex healthcare systems where mutual understanding and integration of complementary expertise, communication, collaboration and decision making is key to comprehensive patient care and best outcomes. Medical issues and clinical situations often require a holistic understanding that goes beyond a single discipline; generalists and specialists need to work together. Practioners can’t know everything about everything!
Widened horizons. IDL can help students appreciate the interconnectedness of various factors important for patient care such as physiological, psychological, and social. IDL can expose students to different knowledge and perspectives such that they can analyse complex cases from different angles and integrate knowledge leading to more effective problem-solving in clinical settings. It can increase the ability to recognise bias, think critically and tolerate ambiguity.
Effective teamwork. IDL develops effective communication, collaboration and teamwork among healthcare professionals, important for delivering comprehensive and coordinated patient care. This can better prepare students for work in diverse healthcare settings and equip them with broader skills, enabling them to be more versatile and adaptable in their careers and enhancing their professional development.
Improved student experience. IDL can improve the student experience; by and large studies have shown that students express higher levels of engagement and satisfaction when exposed to IDL, which can contribute to improved learning outcomes.
How can IDL be implemented?
IDL can be incorporated into medical education in a number of ways, but to be effective it needs to be purposefully integrated into the curriculum and explicit in learning sessions (you can’t just throw students together and expect the learning to happen spontaneously). IDL lends itself to learning opportunities that can be designed to be authentic real-life situations such as:
Case-based learning (CBL) – students work together on case studies that require input from various professions to help them understand each other’s roles and contributions to patient care;
Simulated scenarios / role playing– students from different professions (or playing the role of different professions) collaborate to address the simulated patient’s needs, honing their teamwork and communication skills in a safe environment as well as understand the perspectives and responsibilities of each profession;
Interprofessional clinical experiences – students from various professions complete clinical placements together to expose them to the interprofessional dynamics of healthcare delivery in reality;
Team-based learning (e.g. clinical rounds)– students discuss patient cases and treatment plans collaboratively (builds upon CBL);
Interprofessional workshops/projects – bring students from various disciplines together to collaborate and develop solutions for healthcare challenges;
Reflective practices – such as team debriefing sessions and individual reflective journals to contemplate experiences, challenges, insights and opportunities for improvement, with a focus on the IDL.
What are the challenges of IDL?
Resource implications. Implementing IDL can pose logistical and resourcing (appropriately skilled staff – ideally interprofessional team teaching, time, costs) challenges; it can be difficult to coordinate curricula and schedules to bring different healthcare students together at appropriate time in their educational journey.
Timing. The jury is out as to when is the best time to implement IDL and for how long (e.g., periodic exposure or continuous immersion). Ideally team dynamics need time to develop, so communication becomes more open and collaborative, with trust and appreciation of diversity of knowledge.
Experience levels. While the point of IDL is to bring together diverse students for learning, there may be issues associated with this such as: Learner-level matching (do they have sufficient background knowledge and experience to work together effectively?); differences in learning preferences may be more exaggerated due to prior teaching and learning experiences; epistemics (the disciplinary ideas about what knowledge is and how to use and produce knowledge) and specific manner of communication are part of the culture of particular disciplines that may hinder IDL.
Perceptions and Biases. Perceptual barriers in competence perceptions may lead to a lack of self-confidence or respect for co-learners and personal characteristics such as curiosity, respect, and openness, patience, diligence, and self-regulation have been suggested to be important characteristics for enabling cognitive advancement in IDL.
Measures of impact. Evaluating the effectiveness of IDL can be challenging. Traditional assessment methods may not adequately capture the depth and breadth of knowledge, behaviour and attitudes or ‘interdisciplinary thinking and doing’ – i.e., the capacity to integrate knowledge and ways of thinking and doing across areas of expertise to produce a better outcome than could be achieved otherwise.
Future Research
While the general consensus is that IDL should be an integral part of the curriculum for healthcare students, the importance of IDL is largely based on theory and there remains a lack of large, multi-centre long-term studies. Therefore, currently it is unclear what strategies are best for long-term behaviour change and positive patient outcomes.
