Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Curriculum change is a recurring challenge facing most educational teams. Economic austerity has an impact on these processes in that clinical workloads increase and additional funds to drive curriculum change are lacking. We faced significant challenges having to implement substantial changes to the Year 3 and 4 undergraduate curricula in a large teaching hospital in the United Kingdom. The changes are now implemented successfully and we have taken the opportunity to identify factors that allowed us to drive change and achieve our aims. Much has been written about curriculum change as an academic challenge but comparatively little is known about how to drive such change on the ground and strategies to drive curriculum change during times of ongoing financial austerity are lacking. Here, we reflect on our experience and provide tips for educational teams on how to turn change into an opportunity, despite economic austerity and ever-increasing clinical workload.
Highlights
In a world of constant change, undergraduate medical education is no exception
Very little is known about the impact of economic austerity on medical education
Ever-increasing clinical workload and time pressures may lead to declining staff morale with cynicism and burnout and it is easy to see how, in a system under pressure, educational activities may have less priority than direct patient care
Summary
In a world of constant change, undergraduate medical education is no exception. In the United Kingdom (UK) substantial changes to medical curricula occurred after the General Medical Council (GMC) published the first edition of Tomorrows Doctors in 1993 (GMC, 2009). We worked with the hospital management and the Medical Director to agree an educational tariff whereby every possible role in undergraduate or postgraduate education accounted for a defined amount of time in clinicians’ supporting professional activity (SPA) time within their job plans This tariff aligns with educational requirements and ensures equity and fairness whereby only current contribution to teaching is remunerated, but not historical achievements or roles that no longer exist. We propose that change is a much better environment to identify future leaders than a steady-state environment in the sense that suitable individuals can show their creativity, organisational skills and resilience and flexibility during times of great change To foster this process and to encourage successful placement supervisors to progress their careers we have recently established additional educational area lead roles. At very little additional cost, this development helped us enormously to foster a culture of continued improvement and reward individual and team achievement
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