50 at 50: Innovations in Medical Education Conference
January 22, 2021, by School of Medicine
50 at 50: Innovations in Medical Education Conference
Celebrations of 50 years of Medicine and 30 years of Nursing at Nottingham are in full swing and the conference on Innovations in Medical Education held on the 13 January was a fitting part of these events. The programme included speakers from a wide range of backgrounds and covered ground-breaking research, medical careers, entry into medical school, widening participation, transition and well-being of students, support for students, adaptations to the pandemic including the major changes to CP1 required to deliver it on-line as well as clinical skills teaching, decolonising the medical curriculum and even a bit of crystal ball-gazing!
The conference was organised by Stevie Agius, Julie Hall and Alistair Warren. You can view the list of contributors and sessions online. Many thanks to all involved for giving their time so generously and for being so engaged, but a particular thanks to Stacy Johnson MBE for chairing the panel discussion on decolonising the medical curriculum.
As other bloggers in this series have noted, medical education has changed hugely since the School of Medicine was set-up over 50 years ago. The opportunities for staff to enhance their skills and knowledge through postgraduate courses such as those run in the Medical Education Centre have played a key part in this and research opportunities in medical education, clinical practise and medical sciences are available to staff, postgraduates and undergraduates at Nottingham, making us unique. We are also the largest medical school in the UK, with students based in Nottingham, Derby and now Lincoln. Indeed we might have called the celebrations 50/30/1 to recognise the first year of successful operation of the Lincoln Medical School!
While planning the conference it became clear that we could only scratch the surface of the enormous range of innovations and research in medical education taking place at Nottingham. Several topics were suggested for future conferences and further suggestions are welcome. Topics suggested include cross-faculty collaborations, primary care and curriculum development, the latter being particularly timely because of the development of the clinical course in medicine being led by Dr Lucy Ambrose. I suspect we will have enough suggestions for high quality innovations and research until the 100/80 celebrations in 2070!
Alistair Warren is Vice-Dean Early Years and BMedSci (Lincoln) and professor of Anatomical Sciences. A biomedical scientist, he is Fellow of the Anatomical Society, Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, and Principle Fellow of The Higher Education Academy
