Abstract
Medical student textbooks are traditionally written by senior clinicians, with little if any input from medical students or junior doctors (“juniors”). However, juniors have been shown to be effective educators in various teaching settings. They have a good appreciation of the learning needs and styles of contemporary students. We hypothesized such benefits of junior-led teaching could be successfully applied to medical textbooks. This article describes the Unofficial Guide to Medicine project, a novel, junior-led approach to textbook writing. We discuss the process from the recruitment of juniors through to the final publication of a textbook, comparing and contrasting our approach with more traditional publishing models. The specific roles juniors perform and their potential progression from junior reviewer to editor is explained, as is the collaboration with senior clinicians. Juniors not only lead the process of writing, but also editing, graphic design, and print review. The use of social media to gain feedback from a large cohort of juniors during the book writing process and the positive effects this has on the development of titles is highlighted, as are the potential difficulties this dynamic writing model produces.We finish by looking at feedback from the published titles from the series, discussing thebenefits to those juniors who participate and describe how you can get involved.
Highlights
Medical textbooks are predominantly written by senior clinicians with a vast wealth of experience in both delivering teaching and practising medicine
Such research has not been conducted in the field of medical textbook writing, and juniors have had a relatively small role as textbook authors until recently
The challenge in producing these textbooks was to allow material to be created from the junior perspective while involving the senior staff. We addressed this by asking seniors to approve the factual accuracy of the text at multiple stages of the production process rather than inviting them to write any of the content of the textbooks (Figure 2). This allows for the final product to be in the language of juniors but with a Qureshi, Z. et al A long-term, sustainable, inclusive, international model for facilitating junior doctor and medical student-led publishing
Summary
Medical textbooks are predominantly written by senior clinicians with a vast wealth of experience in both delivering teaching and practising medicine. This model has been very successful, but arguably has left the potential contribution of “juniors” (medical students and junior doctors) untapped. There is evidence in the literature suggesting that juniors can be effective medical teachers.[1,2] They are able to use their recent experience of being learners to relate to current students. This experience can help such teachers identify and address the changing learning needs of students. This article describes the unique approach taken to developing these textbooks and compares and contrasts it to the experience of working with more standard publishing models
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