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.
We are hugely pleased to share another amazing success for the fantastic Dr Grace Pearson, who is this year’s winner of the Association for the Study of Medical Education Trainees TASME Mentorship Prize.
The TASME Mentorship Prize is an individual award that provides resources for early career health professions educators to develop a mentorship relationship that will support their development as an educator.
Grace is this year’s winner of this prestigious award with her submission ‘Improving the care of older people in Zimbabwe through undergraduate and postgraduate teaching innovation.’ Grace shares that,
“this prize will help towards work with clinicians at the University of Zimbabwe Medical School, strengthening collaborative efforts to innovate teaching in geriatric medicine.”
Congratulations Grace, we look forward to hearing all about this exciting work in the future.
Trainees in the Association for the Study of Medical Education (TASME) is a career group of ASME. TASME’s mission is to foster interest and support development in medical education amongst early career doctors (up to 5 years post foundation training) – and early career allied healthcare professionals (up to 7 years post graduation).
This month’s highlighted Educator Profile is Dr Ed Luff
Ed is an Emergency Medical Doctor and Bristol Medical School graduate. His role is currently split between working as a Clinical Lecturer at Bristol Medical School and Speciality Teaching Fellow and Tutor at South Bristol Academy, based in the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
He is also finishing his MSc dissertation exploring students’ experiences and perceptions of using simulation as a method to teach human factors and non-technical skills, as part of his studies on the Health Professionals Education (TLHP) course.
The mission and aim of the ClinEdR Incubator is to support and promote careers in clinical education research through building a multi-professional community of practice. It extends across all health professions and aims to bring people together to develop their ideas, build collaborations and provide a network of developing experience in the field.
What is Clinical Education Research?
This is one of the most fundamental questions and tends to have a myriad of different definitions and terms including clinical, medical, and healthcare professionals education research to name just a few. Often the word ‘clinical’ can drive the idea that this sort of research must have a direct impact in clinical practice and thus can seem to exclude certain areas of research in education.
The team at the Incubator have tried to broaden this idea, embracing all sorts of different research that can and does have an impact on societal health needs by “enhancing the education, training and development of health and social care practitioners, and the organisations within which they work and learn“. They highlight a number of different areas in which individuals and teams may be undertaking clinical education research such as:
Pedagogical research
Planning and design of educational programmes
Regulation processes
Organisation context of learning, such as learning environments and workforce inclusivity
Learner experience and careers
They also consider that this whilst this type of research may have a direct clinical impact for patients it may achieve impact in other ways such as benefiting clinicians in their training, influencing health and education systems and through challenging and developing standards.
How can the Incubator help those who want to engage in Clinical Education Research?
The incubator is a fantastic place to start regardless of where you are in your ClinEdR journey. It offers a variety of resource and links via it’s website such as:
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 this blog, Dr Liang-Fong Wong shares some key insights into how we foster an inclusive environment for international students within our university academic systems and culture.
This is an area of work that is close to my heart – being an international student at Bristol myself many moons ago, my international roles, and serendipitously, it was being organised by my netball teammate Catriona Johnson, from the Centre for Academic Language and Development (CALD).
L-R: Assoc Prof Liang-Fong Wong, Dr Fiona Holmes, and Dr Claire Hudson at BILT International Student Experience workshop, 2023.
Catriona and I had previously shared many courtside and car conversations about her project work on academic language and literacy, but have never interacted within our work capacities. I was delighted to turn up on the day to find fellow BMERG members Fiona Holmes and Claire Hudson there as well!
International staff and students are an important community at our institution: they are invaluable to the diversity of our campuses, adding richness and vibrancy to our learning environments and making us all much better global citizens for now and the future. There is so much that we can learn from each other across different cultures.
During the session, we were given an overview of the numerous BILT-funded projects across the university that explore themes such as increasing inclusivity in the international classroom, decolonising curricula and developing sense and belonging.
Fiona Hartley (BILT/CALD) presented the ‘3 shocks’ that international students can experience:
Pedagogical (knowing what to expect academically)
Language (how to express oneself academically)
Cultural (feeling a sense of belonging and community in Bristol)
What was really interesting was the observation that some of these shocks may not be unique to international students, and indeed may be familiar to others in the wider student population, particularly first-year students.
We discussed in small groups how different schools use effective interventions and ways to enhance teaching and learning experience within and outside of the classroom. There were so many great examples, such as:
optional induction modules
allocating groups and facilitating group work sensitively
Through sharing experiences across the whole university and across disciplines, it gave us ideas on how we can implement some of these strategies in our own practices.
All in all, I really enjoyed the session; it was such an enriching discussion and I got to know many people outside of the medical school.
Dr Liang-Fong Wong is one of the University of Bristol’s Associate Pro-Vice Chancellors for Internationalisation as well as working as an Associate Professor in regenerative medicine. She also works with the undergraduate students as the Year 4 co-lead for the medical programme and is one of the inaugural members of the BMERG committee.
In this wonderfully insightful blog, Dr Sarah McLaughlin reflects upon a recent journal article rejection and suggests looking back at the journey travelled to put academic setbacks into perspective.
How many of us have shared this experience – the article you poured your heart and soul into, and submitted to a journal is returned and has not been accepted?
You are thanked for your submission and it is their pleasure to inform you that the referee’s responses are contained in the email. The referees are unable to accept your article for publication in its current form, but if you are willing to substantially revise according to their requirements and resubmit it, they will reconsider your article.
At this point your heart drops and you feel like you are never going to get any further in academia. Does this sound familiar? It happened to me this week. I know I am not alone in this experience.
At first you may hear that this is a rejection of your work. Maybe you hear – you are not good enough, you are not as good as the others or maybe you should give up.
This time I have approached this set back differently and want to share my thoughts with you. How about looking not at where you want to be: published and accomplished – but you look back. You look back at how far you have come to get to this point. You focus not on what you have yet to achieve, but you focus on the journey travelled.
Let’s take our first look back.
To get the point of submitting an article to a journal, you have spent hours writing and completing an article ready for submission.
To get to the point where you write your first sentence, you have conducted some research.
Maybe this was for your Masters or doctoral qualification where you worked your way from your proposal, poured over the literature, worked through your ethics application, to recruiting participants, gathering your data and spending hours writing up your research in order to submit your dissertation or thesis. That is one big achievement in itself.
But let’s look back a little further.
How did you get to the point where you commenced your current studies? There was a time when you were applying to university to commence your undergraduate degree, wondering if you would be accepted. Would you pass your entry requirements? Would you even make it to day one of your undergraduate degree?
Maybe look back even further.
Did you walk into the exam hall for your GCSEs or school exams wondering if you had done enough revision, worked hard enough and would you be able to answer all the questions within the tight time given to sit your exam. Maybe you did not pass your exams first time and had to resit them.
Maybe you didn’t enter university through the traditional A level route and returned to education as a mature student through an Access course or an equivalent. Can you even remember as far back as your school exams? How many years have passed, how many times have you submitted an assignment or sat an exam since then? How many other times have you received disappointing feedback or felt like giving up… but you didn’t?
So, now let’s come back to our current feelings.
What was your journey to the point where you uploaded your article to the journal and crossed your fingers? How was the journey you travelled to get there? How long did it take you? How many setbacks did you overcome? How many times did you feel like giving up? These reflections may help put this current feeling of rejection and your article into perspective.
Come back to the feedback with fresh eyes and see it for what it is – some advice on how to make your article more aligned with the journal’s aims or make your arguments clearer, or analysis more aligned with theory. It is an opportunity to improve.
Read the feedback carefully to understand why it was not accepted. What you can do to improve your article, and importantly, increase your chances of your revision being accepted and published?
Don’t take it personally.
Rejection is common, and it demonstrates that these journals have high standards to maintain, which is a good thing. It does not reflect your worth as an academic. Most importantly, don’t give up.
Keep going.
You are one of many scholars who have had an article sent back to amend. This is a normal and common part of the journey towards article publication. Receiving what feels like a rejection may feel like a blow, but it is part of your journey. Looking back at how far you’ve come may help you see that this is just one more step along the way. Don’t give up. Keep going. It’s all about the journey travelled.
For the first in our new ‘In conversation with‘ Series*, our BMERG co-chair Dr Sarah Allsop invited Dr Megan Brown to join BMERG for an online webinar to share her experience as an educator. Here we share some of the topics from the discussion and Megan’s top tips for embracing potential in medical education research.
We started the conversation talking about career journeys. Megan shared her own journey into Medical Education, starting in a clinical role as a doctor, and moving through a PGCert in Medical Education and then a PhD, before continuing on to research associate roles. She described her journey as feeling initially ‘pick and mix’ or serendipitous, a sense that many of us in the medical education discipline have come to know and feel, but that actually every experience has things we can take away, things we can learn, and can ultimately shape who we are and what we do.
She talked of how the different aspects of her work, whether on identity, equality or creativity, have all come together to create an interesting portfolio of work about how we look at practices within medical education, and how this translates to workforce issues like wellbeing and staff retention.
Top Tip: Consider not only your current research project, but the body or programme of research that you are doing and how this fits together. All of us need to consider what our story is: what matters to us, what impact we want to have and ultimately what we want to be known for.
Megan also talked about the way in which networking, both in person and social media has been influential in her making connections. Social media can be a really helpful way to get exposure both to others in the discipline and exposure for your own work, but the drawback is it takes time and energy.
The landscape in social media is also changing and is not for everyone. Megan encouraged us that whilst networking is important and can help to make connections that open doors, this can be done in a number of different ways, via emails, list servers, meetings and conferences to name just a few.
She also impressed on us not to get tied up in hierarchy. It is really important to connect with your peers in the discipline; those much further ahead may be really interesting to talk to, but these conversations may not yield collaborations.
Top Tip: Connect with those peers who show similar interests, and ambition to create impact in the same area as you. We are stronger when we work together.
We then talked about publishing and if Megan had any advice for those wanting to publish their work. She started with the advice to think about impact and outputs early on the the research process. All research is done to try to solve a problem, uncover truths or to empower change for the better, and so will usually have an important audience. By thinking about who might want or need to know about your results in order to influence the change you want to see, you can think about which journal, book or other medium is the best place for your work. We also talked a little about the publishing ‘game’ and the inevitable rejection that comes with trying to disseminate our work, and not to get put off by this.
Top Tip: Think broadly about how and where to disseminate your work and how to make it translatable to others. It’s not just empirical research that can be shared through publication, but commentaries, innovations, evaluation and methods, so make sure to consider carefully the best match for your work.
Finally we talked a little about role models, and Megan shared that whilst she thinks her mentors have been really important for supporting her in her career goals, she does not really have specific role models. She explained that as she is not trying to replicate another individual, she takes inspiration from wide sources, both people and environments, and through her own creativity. This has inspired her to use creative methods within her research and led to a project using poetic enquiry, “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn: poetic inquiry within health professions education“.
Top Tip: Take inspiration from everywhere, and don’t be afraid to try new things and look for ideas outside medical education to drive new and exciting innovation.
Part of Megan’s work is being involved with the NIHR Incubator for Clinical Education Research. The Incubator’s mission is support and promote careers in clinical education research and build a multi-professional community of practice in this space, including offering free events for educators.
The next free online event and discussion, “Getting Started In … coming up with an idea and writing a research question” will be held 12.45-1.45pm Wednesday December 20th, 2023. You can sign up for this webinar and others here.
Guest Speaker Biography
Dr Megan Brown (she/her) is a Senior Research Associate in Medical Education at Newcastle University, Director of Communications and Social Media at ASME, Co-chair for Dissemination at the NIHR Incubator for Clinical Education Research, and Vice-chair of the MedEd Collaborative.Megan trained as a doctor but made the transition to full-time academic practice. Megan’s research focuses on translating and applying educational theory to practice; workforce issues within the NHS; creative approaches to research; and EDI, particularly relating to improving the support and experiences of disabled healthcare professionals, as Megan is a disabled, and neurodivergent academic herself.
* BMERG ‘In conversation with’ Series. This series of events will bring some amazing speakers to speak and share their experiences in medical education and research. Please note some sessions are only accessible to University of Bristol Staff and Students.
In BMERG’s latest report from 2023 conferences, Dr David Hettle reviews the Developing Medical Educators Group (DMEG) Annual Conference which was held online in October 2023.
The DMEG* conference provides a great opportunity for early-years educators (students, CTFs, or anyone else beginning their medical education journey) to meet others, feel inspired by a conference and presenters looking out for those at the early stage of their educator career and hear about the work of the Academy of Medical Educators and its Developing Medical Educators’ Group.
This year, the DMEG Annual Conference 2023 once again took place online, to promote access to such a conference to developing educators from across the UK and further afield. While the conference’s focus is primarily at developing medical educators and those in parallel training (medical, dental, veterinary or other healthcare science), everyone in medical education continues to develop and so there was something for everybody.
This year, keynote speakers included Dr Phil Xiu and Dr Linda Prescott-Clements, sharing their stories and journeys through healthcare education They inspired attendees to consider their next steps and all the different avenues to pursue this through, as well as recognising that medical educators are the “bridge between skill and passion” in delivering education to students, colleagues and patients.
There were also a number of excellent workshops, focussing on multiple aspects of medical education, such as clinical education scholarship, tips and tricks of teaching critical appraisal as well as developing and delivering workshops, and considering developing your career as a medical educator. View the DMEG 2023 conference programme here and the DMEG 2023 abstract book here.
DMEG also hosts both oral presentations and video pitches during their conferences, sharing novel work and innovations from participating medical educators. This year, the University of Bristol was well represented.
Last year’s University of Bristol lead Clinical Teaching Fellows (CTFs) Dr Alice Middleton (in collaboration Dr Gabriella Agathangelou), gave an oral presentation discussing their new role as lead CTFs and the wins and challenges of building a community of practice amongst CTFs, ‘Herding Cats’. They were highly commended in the oral presentation category.
Former Clinical Teaching Fellows, Dr Jacqueline Roy and Dr Tirion Swart from the North Bristol University of Bristol Teaching Academy were awarded first prize in the Video Pitch category for their work on development of a podcast to support clinical years’ medical student learning on ‘Geri-Pods’, using Podcasts to Broaden Learning on the MDT’s Role in Practice for Medical Students. You can view Jacky and Tirion’s winning pitch on Twitter(X).
Screenshot from Jacky and Tirion’s DMEG video pitch presentation
Well done to Alice, Gabby, Jacky and Tirion!
It is expected that DMEG 2024 will again be hosted online, and would be a great opportunity for anyone from the University of Bristol or further afield to meet with other beginning educators looking out for what they’re interested in, seeing what is out there in medical education and look to meet some like-minded individuals from across the world. It is anticipated that the conference will be held early October next year again, but keep an eye on the links above nearer to the time for information and abstract calls.
* The Developing Medical Educators Group (DMEG) is a subgroup of the Academy of Medical Educators and aims to promote the development of early career educators including doctors, medical students, dentists, physician associates and veterinary educators. It is open to all early career educators who are Student, Associate or Full Members of AoME.
