Developments at the Royal Free and university college medical school

Abstract

The Royal Free and University College Medical School (RFUCMS) is a large and traditional research based institution. With the changes in all medical schools following the GMC's recommendations in Tomorrows’ Doctors, we have been trying to increase the local emphasis on the development of innovations in medical education. The Academic Centre for Medical Education (ACME) was set up in 2002 to support our new curriculum, and to encourage the development of a more academic approach to medical education. For this issue of The Clinical Teacher, we have selected an eclectic mix of papers to provide some insight into the teaching and learning experience at our medical school. It is not comprehensive, but will, I hope, give readers of The Clinical Teacher a flavour. We are keen for all of the RFUCMS community to develop high quality teaching and research skills in medical education. We aim to expose as many people as possible to the benefits of being a good clinical teacher. This ranges from those still in their school years, to senior practising doctors. We encourage our undergraduate medical students to develop their teaching skills, and have an increasingly competent cohort of well motivated Peer Assisted Learning Students (PALS). Led by Dr Deborah Gill, the PALS team describe their experiences of inter-professional education. Following the theme of involving our students, the next paper is written by Kath Woolf, a psychology student who is enrolled for a PhD with us. She has had to take a step back from traditional psychometrics, and to work out what it means to become a qualitative researcher in medical education. Our medical school is now very big, with intakes of between 360 and 410 students per year. It is increasingly difficult to make them all feel valued. To help with the process, we have been reorganising our student welfare provision, and are developing more insight into just how stressful medical education can be for the students. We desperately need better early warning systems for students in difficulty. We are also beginning to understand how doctors get into similar difficulties through our work on the Tests of Competence in the GMC Performance Procedures. We hope you will find the article describing this process of interest, and reassuring! We have also included an article from our communication skills team as we must not forget that most doctors and students with difficulties have major problems with their communication. ‘Assessment drives learning’. We believe that if the assessment is good, the students learn the right things. Our final contribution to this themed edition from RFUCMS is a description of our new finals clinical examination. This was a huge piece of development work. It is now up and running……so far so good. We thought the experience may help those of you in the throes of redesigning of your exams. Good luck with it!