Megan Brown

Imperial College London | Imperial · Medical Education Innovation and Research Centre

Hailed by supporters as the answer to many challenges facing medical schools and the wider health care system, longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) offer a practical and sustainable alternative to more traditional block rotational models. Given this, their popularity as a curricular measure is increasing, although such clerkships remain relati...

A research paradigm, or set of common beliefs about research, should be a key facet of any research project. However, despite its importance, there is a paucity of general understanding in the medical sciences education community regarding what a research paradigm consists of and how to best construct one. With the move within medical sciences educ...

As I entered the OSCE station, I ran through my mental checklist: smile and shake my examiner’s hand, warmly greet the patient, obtain a detailed history, and make an empathic statement. The station was going well, I gathered a comprehensive history and established a strong rapport. However, when I made my pre‐rehearsed statement of empathy, “I’m s...

Context: Although the uptake of Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LICs) is increasing worldwide, and there are documented benefits to participation, there is a lack of conceptual evidence regarding how LICs exert many of their benefits, including their influence on the recruitment and retention of practitioners to underserved areas or specialtie...

The path to acceptance of new ideas within scientific disciplines is often fraught. The philosopher Schopenhauer recognised that important ideas must endure a hostile reception before they are accepted ¹, suggesting they are usually ridiculed when first platformed. Yet, in time, opposition fades and new ideas are ‘accepted as being self‐evident’¹ f...

Introduction Professional identity development is a central aim of medical education, which has been disrupted during COVID-19. Yet, no research has qualitatively explored COVID-19’s impact across institutions or countries on medical students’ identities. Kegan proposes a cognitive model of identity development, where ‘disorientating dilemmas’ prom...

Covid-19 has altered medical education worldwide. Given recent events, UK Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LICs), which are relatively new innovations, may have changed in structure and delivery, or may have demonstrated resilience. Collating the responses and experiences of UK institutions may yield transferrable recommendations for institution...

Purpose: Longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) have been implemented worldwide to increase authentic student participation in patient care over time. Studies have shown benefits of the model include the ability of LICs to attract future practitioners to underserved areas, student engagement in advocacy, and development of an "ethic of caring."...

Background Empathic erosion and burnout represent crises within medicine. Psychological training has been used to promote empathy and personal resilience, yet some training useful within adjacent fields remain unexplored, e.g., Stoic training. Given recent research within psychology suggesting that Stoic training increases emotional wellbeing, expl...

Stoic philosophy is widely misrepresented within medicine, often negatively portrayed as a ‘stiff upper lip’. In reality, Stoicism is a holistic philosophy with a primary concern of helping people live engaged, contented lives. In medicine, Stoicism offers a way to process distressing emotions felt as a result of ‘seeing the world from the patient’...

Although health professions education has philosophical roots, it has drifted far from its original moorings as the field has developed and is little-represented within contemporary health professions discourse. This can make philosophy seem difficult or daunting. In this introduction, we offer our thoughts regarding how to engage with philosophy w...

The role of feminist theory in health professions education is often ‘ova-looked’. Gender is one cause of healthcare inequalities within contemporary medicine. Shockingly, according to the World Health Organisation, no European member state has achieved full gender equity in regard to health outcomes. Further, contemporary curricula have not evolve...

In the newest installment of the new Medical Education Connections series, Brown and Younie juxtapose recent findings to offer insight into how to nurture person‐centredness.

This talk outlines a personal journey into Medical Education research, followed by an overview of setting up a medical research collaborative during the COVID-19 pandemic. It concludes with some personal pearls and pitfalls of research and a Q&A session

The authors highlight barriers to a lack of engagement with relational approaches to medical education by synthesising findings from four State of the Science papers focused on Social aspects of health professional education.

Background: Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LIC) are a relatively novel type of clinical placement model within medical education, particularly within the UK. The research on LICs primarily focuses on the impact of the model on students, tutors, communities, and organisations. The impact of LICs on patients has not yet been adequately synthesi...

Context Medical education is committed to teaching patient centred communication and empathy. However, quantitative research suggests empathy scores tend to decline as students progress through medical school. In qualitative terms, there is a need to better understand how students and tutors view the practice and teaching of clinical empathy and th...

Introduction Professional identity formation (PIF) is a priority of medical training. Covid-19 caused disruption to medical education. We ask how this disruption impacted PIF through the lens of the activities performed – or not performed – by medical students during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, and perceptions of conflicts between acti...

Transition to practice can be a turbulent time for new doctors. It has been proposed transition is experienced non-linearly in physical, psychological, cultural and social domains. What is less well known, however, is whether transition within these domains can contribute to the experience of moral injury in new doctors. Further, the lived experien...

Qualitative inquiry is increasingly popular in health professions education, and there has been a move to solidify processes of analysis to demystify the practice and increase rigour. Whilst important, being bound too heavily by methodological processes potentially represses the imaginative creativity of qualitative expression and interpretation—tr...

Background: Volunteering to work in a clinical capacity during the Covid-19 pandemic was a unique learning experience for medical students, but it is unknown whether this helped prepare students for practice as doctors. Volunteering may benefit students through service-based learning, a method of teaching where students perform roles that intersect...

Introduction: COVID-19 has caused major disruptions to healthcare, with voluntary opportunities offered to medical students to provide clinical support. We used the conceptual framework of prosocial behavior during an emergency - behaviors whose primary focus is benefiting others - to examine volunteering during COVID-19. Methods: We conducted an i...

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to global disruption of healthcare. Many students volunteered to provide clinical support. Volunteering to work in a clinical capacity was a unique medical education opportunity; however, it is unknown whether this was a positive learning experience or which volunteering roles were of most be...

Introduction In response to the disruption to medical education caused by COVID-19, there is a need for wide-scale robust medical education research and the generation of research capacity for the future. Trainee research collaboratives have demonstrated they can nurture the research skills of students and trainees while delivering high quality res...

Introduction COVID-19 led to global disruption of healthcare and many students volunteered to provide clinical support. Volunteering to work was a unique medical education opportunity; however, it is unknown whether this was a positive learning experience. Methods The COVID Ready 2 study is a national cross-sectional study of all medical students a...

Issue Threshold Concepts are increasingly used and researched within health professions education. First proposed by Meyer and Land in 2003, they can be defined as ways of knowing central to the mastery of a subject. They are framed as profoundly transformative, impacting the identity of those who encounter them through irreversible shifts in an in...

Background Longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) are a relatively new model of clinical medical education, whereby students participate in patient care over time and develop relationships with those patients’, their clinicians, and other health care staff involved in the care of those patients. It has been called ‘relationship-based education’...

Background and objectives: Covid-19 has led to global disruption of healthcare. Many students volunteered to provide clinical support. Volunteering to work in a clinical capacity was a unique medical education opportunity; however, it is unknown whether this was a positive learning experience or which volunteering roles were of most benefit to stud...

We have recently utilised Love and Breakup Letter Methodology (LBM)1, 2 in medical education research3, - the first time this has been reported in the literature. LBM was developed within the discipline of User Experience (UX) 4 , where it is typically used as a tool to capture what focus group participants like or dislike about technological featu...

Introduction: COVID-19 led to global disruption of healthcare and many students volunteered to provide clinical support. Volunteering to work was a unique medical education opportunity; however, it is unknown whether this was a positive learning experience. Methods: The COVID Ready 2 study is a national cross-sectional study of all medical student...

Introduction: In response to the disruption to medical education caused by COVID-19, there is a need for wide-scale robust medical education research and the generation of research capacity for the future. Trainee research collaboratives have demonstrated they can nurture the research skills of students and trainees while delivering high quality re...

Introduction Medical education is committed to promoting empathic communication. Despite this, much research indicates that empathy actually decreases as students progress through medical school. In qualitative terms, relatively little is known about this changing student relationship with the concept of empathy for patients and how teaching affect...

The humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society, experience and culture. Typically, the humanities, including philosophy, literature, art, music, history and language have been used to interpret and record our understanding of the world. In recent decades, the humanities have seen somewhat of a renaissance within medicin...

Palliative care is central to the role of all clinical doctors. There is variability in the amount and type of teaching about palliative care at undergraduate level. Time allocated for such teaching within the undergraduate medical curricula remains scarce. Given this, the effectiveness of palliative care teaching needs to be known. Objectives: T...

Longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) are increasingly available within the United Kingdom, but gaps in knowledge remain regarding their efficacy and the influence of local context. In 2019-20, the Hull York Medical School ran a pilot LIC for 6 fourth-year medical students. This work describes the longitudinal qualitative programme evaluation....

The COVID‐19 pandemic has dramatically changed the landscape of medical education. For example, the sudden shift to remote working and online communication has redefined collaboration, which had already become somewhat of a buzzword within the field’s lexicon. Its popularity is understandable, as facilitating collaborative expertise within healthca...

Objective To explore medical student perceptions and experiences of gender bias within medical education. Setting Gender bias—‘prejudiced actions or thoughts based on the perception that women are not equal to men’—is a widespread issue. Within medicine, the pay gap, under-representation of women in senior roles and sexual harassment are among the...

The hidden curriculum within medical education has been a topic of recent debate. Consensus opinion regarding the continued relevance of this term, what constitutes the hidden curriculum, and the nature of its impact do not exist. Further research is required to contribute to this debate. This work sets out to investigate which factors beyond taugh...

Background: Professional identity development is an area of contemporary interest within medical education. It can be defined as 'the foundational process one experiences during the transformation from lay person to physician'. In order for this transformation to occur, medical values and principles are internalised. A robust professional identity...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted undergraduate medical studies. Whilst challenges for knowledge and clinical skills are being actively addressed, wider considerations such as the impact on professional identity development have been mostly neglected thus far. A robust professional identity is linked to professional behaviour...

Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LICs) have a growing presence as a model of educational delivery on the stage of UK medical education, where they are most frequently based within primary care. Yet, despite both local and internationally reported benefits, significant challenges to programme implementation and student engagement remain. Although...

As the role of the Physician Associate (PA) establishes within the UK, there is increasing interest in the recruitment of PAs to primary care. Yet, currently 72% of all UK PAs work in secondary care. Recruitment to primary care is wanting, for reasons that remain unclear. This work sought to investigate student PA experiences in primary care and th...

During the COVID‐19 lockdown one community of homeworkers at risk of being overlooked in contingency planning is that of postgraduate student researchers, known to suffer from higher levels of mental ill‐health than the general population. Physical distance from a supportive network of supervisors, peers and colleagues holds the potential to negati...

ContextOur understanding of clinical empathy could be enhanced through qualitative research—research currently under-represented in the field. Physician associates within the UK undergo an intensive 2-year postgraduate medical education. As a new group of health professionals, they represent a fresh pair of eyes through which to examine clinical em...

The COVID‐19 crisis has resulted in homeworking becoming the norm internationally. As a result, international, national and institutional medical education conferences, workshops and seminars have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely. Consequently, the opportunity for knowledge exchange and networking has been reduced. Hull York Medical School...

Objective To explore student physician associates’ (PAs) experiences of clinical training to ascertain the process of their occupational identity formation. Setting The role of the PA is relatively new within the UK. There has been a rapid expansion in training places driven by National Health Service (NHS) workforce shortages, with the Department...