With the project well underway, it’s a good time to introduce the team undertaking the project. We will have posts from individual team members in coming weeks, but this post will be a quick introduction to us all.

The project is being led from Newcastle University School of Medical Education by Dr Bryan Burford, and Dr Gill Vance. Bryan has a background in social and cognitive psychology, while Gill is a clinician as well as a researcher in medical education. Gill works as a consultant in paediatric allergy at Newcastle’s Great North Children’s Hospital. She is also the Director for the Academic Foundation Programme in Northern Foundation School. Since 2013, Bryan and Gill have completed several projects looking at the work, preparedness and wellbeing of medical students and junior doctors, much of this for the GMC. They are also behind the newly announced NIHR Incubator for Clinical Education. This project represents the first collaboration since the Incubator was confirmed.

At The University of Exeter, Professor Karen Mattick has a particular interest in the links between education, research and practice. She has also completed work for the GMC looking at preparedness, and is a co-lead of the Centre for Research in Professional Learning at Exeter. Karen developed the Care Under Pressure project for the NIHR, which aimed to understand factors shaping doctors’ mental health and to co-produce recommendations that support the tailoring, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of contextually-sensitive strategies to address mental ill-health in doctors. The project was led by Dr Daniele Carrieri, and Karen and Daniele are developing a follow up to that work. 

At Plymouth University, Professor Tom Gale combines educational and clinical expertise as a consultant anaesthetist and Professor of Medical Education at the Peninsula Medical School.  Dr Nicola Brennan is a social scientist by background, and has been working in medical education research for 13 years. Tom and Nicola lead the education research group, CAMERA, which carries out research focused on the development, recruitment and retention of a sustainable healthcare workforce. They will shortly be launching a study commissioned by the GMC to investigate specific themes underpinning  new doctors’ preparedness for practice.

At Queens University Belfast, Professor Tim Dornan has a particular interest in understanding clinical workplace learning. His work has involved many aspects of practice, including doctors’ empathy and readiness for prescribing. A recent publication also looked at another doctors’ adaptation in another natural disaster – the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Tim is also a (now retired) physician and endocrinologist.

The team brings together a range of clinical and non-clinical backgrounds, expertise with quantitative and qualitative methods, and interests in all areas of new doctors’ work and wellbeing. Our driving focus is to ensure that the project allows us to understand the experience of doctors starting work in this challenging period so that they, and stakeholder organisations across the UK, can identify challenges – and positive experiences – to learn for future policy and practice.