Congratulations to everyone in the Faculty who has published their research this quarter. If anything is missing let us know.

Moxham BJ, McHanwell S, Berkovitz B,  The development of a core syllabus for the teaching of oral anatomy, histology, and embryology to dental students via an international ‘Delphi Panel’. Clinical Anatomy. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.23002

Anyiam O, Ware V, McKenna M, Hanley J,  Junior doctor teaching delivered by near peers. Clinical Teacher. https://doi.org/10.1111/tct.12745

Wiskin C, Barrett M, Fruhstorfer B, Schmid ML,  Recommendations for undergraduate medical electives: a UK consensus statement. Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13445

Blaylock P, Ellis JS, McCracken GI, The transition from dental school to postgraduate dental foundation training: strengthening the interaction between stakeholders. British Dental Journal. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2018.79

Gursoy M, Wilensky A, Claffey N, Herrera D, Preshaw PM, Sanz M, Schlagenhauf U, Trombelli L, Demirel K,  Periodontal education and assessment in the undergraduate dental curriculum-A questionnaire-based survey in European countries. European Journal of Dental Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/eje.12330

Hester KLM, Newton J, Rapley T, Ryan V, De Soyza A,  Information and education provision in bronchiectasis: co-development and evaluation of a novel patient-driven resource in a digital era. European Respiratory Journal. https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.02402-2017

B Abdulmohsen, I Gharib, S Mchanwell (2018). How to enhance student engagement through transforming assessment? A creative pedagogic approach. Higher Education Academy STEM Conference 2018: Creativity in Teaching, Learning and Student Engagement.  https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/training-events/hea-stem-conference-2018-creativity-teaching-learning-and-student-engagement

Lim CP, Roberts M, Chalhoub T, Waugh J, Delgaty L.,   Cadaveric surgery in core gynaecology training: a feasibility study. Gynecological Surgery 2018, 15, 4.. .

Iain D. Keenan, J. Duncan Slater., Joanna Matthan,  Social media: Insights for medical education from instructor perceptions and usage. . https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2018.0000027.1

In 2015 the ERDP funded a development project looking at the influences of clinical teachers on GP Trainees choice of career.  The findings highlighted denigration of GP as a career as a problem and it was reported that this starts as an undergraduate student.

Our aim in this follow up ERDP funded project was to explore comments about GP as a career made by clinical teachers to medical students so that we start to understand the current difficulties in recruitment to GP training better and work on ways that those difficulties might be addressed.

Methods
This was a qualitative, explorative study. Data was collected by conducting two focus groups of Medical Students who were undertaking an SSC in GP at Newcastle Medical School.

A semi structured interview format was utilised. They were digitally recorded and professionally transcribed. Results were analysed using thematic analysis.

Results
The study confirmed that students hear comments from clinical teachers which denigrate General Practice as a career. The nature of these comments are consistent with those reported in other work to date.

Themes identified consisted of: the individual, the curriculum and culture in the Medical profession. These were used to postulate a model which may explain why negative comments shape a students’ perception of GP.

Conclusion

Denigration of GP is an ongoing problem with the Medical profession and strategies to address it must be developed or recruitment to the specialty will continue to decline. This study suggests a model which can help to understand the complex relationship between different factors which result in negative comments being taken on board by a student.

Emmet Carlin & Hugh Alberti,  School of Medical Education

We had lots of work showcased at this year’s University Learning and Teaching Conference. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of what was being discussed via presentations, workshops and Lightening Talks.  If your work has been missed off, let us know fms.educational.research@ncl.ac.uk.

Presentations

Recommendations for integrating innovative and creative learning approaches within higher education, Dr Iain Keenan, Lecturer, School of Medical Education

Using neuroscience research to influence teaching: Could ‘spaced learning’work in higher education?, Dr Paul Hubbard, Teaching Fellow, School of Medical Education

Workshops

Reconceptualising and rewarding teaching and teaching excellence in higher education, Prof Danny McLaughlin, School of Medical Education, Prof Stephen McHanwell, School of Medical Education and Prof Sue Robson, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences

Lightning talks

Strand B: How can we encourage an educational experience supported and enhanced by technology? Session chaired by Dr Laura Delgaty, Deputy Degree Programme Director, School of Medical

Using ePortfolio to record the development of professional behavioural attributes and facilitate reflective practice in Pharmacy, Dr Hamde Nazar, Senior Lecturer, School of Pharmacy, Simon Cotterill, L & T Projects and Innovation Manager, Learning Technology Support Unit

Supporting the student voice through the MBBS Medical Learning Environment, Dr David Kennedy, Deputy Head of School, School of Medical Education, John Moss, Faculty Learning Technology Systems Manager, Learning Technology Support Unit, Faculty of Medical Sciences.

Successful use of multiple technologies to reinforce anatomy and physiology theory for first year sport and exercise science undergraduates, Dr Chris Eggett, Senior Lecturer, School of Biomedical Sciences.

How might we develop students as whole people, preparing them to flourish for futures we can’t predict? Cultivating resilience through mindfulness. Michael Atkinson, Teaching Fellow, School of Medical Education, Dr Richy Hetherington, Postgraduate Skills Development Co-ordinator, FMS Graduate School.

Embedding employability skills into an action learning module. Dr Sharron Kuznesof, Senior Lecturer, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences and Dr Helen Mason, Teaching Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences.

Strand C: How can we encourage an educational experience supported and enhanced by technology? Session chaired by Dr Floor Christie-de Jong, Lecturer, FMS Graduate School.

In February the ERDP Unit hosted the seminar ‘Training Tomorrow’s Healthcare Professionals in Exercise Medicine: Prevention and therapeutic management including perioperatively’.

It was delivered on behalf of Public Health England by Ann B Gates, MRPharmS, Associate Editor for the British Journal of Sports Medicine & Mr Ian Ritchie, FRCSEd, Past President of the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh and their message was very clear.

The UK is more physically inactive than many other developed nations in Europe and North America. Around 20 million adults in the UK are so inactive that they are at risk of non-communicable disease, immobility and premature death. This is a major public health matter for all who work in healthcare.

The evidence is that physical activity prevents disease, treats a variety of physical and mental health conditions and helps in the rehabilitation from acute episodes. It is also an effective part of the skillset for any healthcare worker in helping people to manage long term conditions.

Against this background, we believe that there is an imperative for all undergraduate courses to include teaching on physical activity (PA) in their curricula.

Not only is information about PA important, but so is teaching about how to raise the topic in consultations and how to tailor the discussion to meet the individual needs of patients.

The next generation of healthcare professionals have to understand and take on the leadership role on behalf of their communities to ensure that decisions about transport, housing and community facilities recognise the health benefits of encouraging people to walk more and be physically active.

This is a large topic, but there are many resources available at the #MovementForMovement site. These materials have been endorsed by the UK Council of Deans of Health. The UK Chief Medical Officers have also produced excellent infographics to inform about the minimum levels of activity for health for all ages.

For more information contact:

Stephen.mchanwell@newcastle.ac.uk

Ann Gates, Founder and CEO of Exercise Works! annbgates@googlemail.com

Ian Ritchie, Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh, i.ritchie@rcsed.ac.uk

On Wednesday 8th of November Dr Naomi Winstone, Lecturer in Cognitive and Educational Psychology & Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching at the University of Surrey, visited Newcastle to deliver a talk as part of the ERDP seminar series.  The focus of the session was Naomi’s recent work looking at student engagement with feedback.

Her work is embedded in the context of recent efforts by many educators to respond to the student voice calling for “better” feedback but seeks to address why, despite these efforts, many departments still face NSS results that indicate persistent student dissatisfaction.  Naomi and her collaborators have sought to understand this phenomenon in terms of student engagement with feedback.

In experimental situations Naomi and her colleagues have shown that students are more likely to remember evaluative rather than instructive comments which suggests that students are not as good at recalling the parts of their feedback that they might feed-forward into future pieces of work.  Naomi argued that findings such as these indicate the need to foster skills in students that allow them to become ‘proactive recipients’ of feedback not only as essential abilities for their educational journeys but also beyond.

Naomi presented The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit that she has developed alongside Dr Rob Nash for the HEA which provides educators with resources developed in collaboration with students to facilitate their proactive engagement with feedback.

The audience was very receptive to Naomi’s work and whilst voicing some thoughts about how the experimental findings would be replicated in real assessment settings there was a strong consensus about the need to understand feedback as dialogue rather than unidirectional and to ensure educators and students spoke the same “feedback language”. On the back of this seminar session the School of Psychology’s Educational Research in Psychology (ERiP) group has instigated a number of research collaborations with Naomi to start in the new year.

Dr Amy Fielden, School of Psychology

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to this the last issue of the ERDP Newsletter for 2017.

In this issue of the newsletter we have articles from colleagues on projects and periods of study leave that have been supported by the ERDP small grant scheme.  As ever the projects themselves are diverse reflecting the wide range of educational interests within the Faculty.  The extent of that diversity can also be seen in the range and scope of education publications so do take a look at that as well.  An innovation for the newsletter is a Think Piece.  I am often asked about publication in HE Journals and following a recent article in Higher Education Research and Development I have written a short item on publishing in education journal.  I would like to see more of this kind of article in the newsletter so please feel free to submit articles on any topic that you think would interest other readers.

Next year looks to be a busy one in our events programme with seminars and workshops focussed around aspects of the university education strategy and a number of national meetings being held in Newcastle alongside our own Learning and Teaching conference and the Three Rivers Conference.  In January we have Dave Lewis from Leeds speaking on final year projects while in March Stella-Devitt Jones will deliver a seminar and workshop on Uses and Abuses of Student Voice and Gavin Knight will be speaking about assessment.  The Newcastle Learning and Teaching Conference date has been announced and there has been a call for submissions to deliver hands on workshops, presentations, lightning talks and posters.  The keynote speaker is Camille Kandiko Howson who will be talking on learning gain which is an especially hot topic at the moment.  There is also a call for submissions to the Three Rivers Conference.

Please consider submitting a proposal to one or both of these conferences as they provide a good opportunity to speak to colleagues locally or wider in the region.  With two national meetings being held in Newcastle there are plenty of opportunities to talk about your work or simply to attend to hear what is going on.  As if this was not enough our newly-arrived Pharmacy School is hosting a conference in July and having seen the provisional list of speakers this promises to be of interest to many and not just those in Pharmacy education.  Make sure you save those dates in the diary.

All that remains now is to wish you all and very Happy Christmas and New Year and a restful break after what is always a very busy semester.

Prof Steve McHanwell, Director, FMS Unit for ERDP

We’re pleased to announce that the following projects have been funded by the ERDP.

Earlier this year, we welcomed the very first cohort of Sport and Exercise Science students to the FMS here at Newcastle University. With their arrival, so came pertinent questions about how they will contribute to society once they graduate. And so despite the threat of man-eating sharks, spiders as big as your hand and the odd drop-bear, I ventured to the East coast of Australia on a fact finding mission: namely, to explore the career pathways of Australian Sport and Exercise Science graduates. This is because Australian universities have an excellent reputation for producing high-quality Sport and Exercise Science graduates who work in clinically-based contexts.

My first stop saw me present at the International Society of Biomechanics World Congress in Brisbane. The presentation focussed on some collaborative work (a big thanks to Naomi Oosman-Watts from the Careers Service) on graduate destinations of UK Sport and Exercise Science graduates over the past decade.  The questions and conversations that followed highlighted that universities worldwide are facing the same increasing pressures as we are to help students find meaningful employment, although there exists a wide variety of potential solutions with varying degrees of success.

The second part of my trip Down Under included visits to several key figures at leading universities, sporting institutes and the national industry body, Exercise & Sport Science Australia. The most striking difference between the Australian system and most of the world (including the UK) is the clear pathway Australian graduates have into clinical-based practice, particularly for graduates working as registered Exercise Physiologists within the national healthcare system. The regulatory framework that allows this to occur took over a decade to be established but now provides a huge benefit to graduates because they have well-defined pathways to employment and the focus on clinical-based destinations addresses a well-defined need within the community with respect to rehabilitative and preventative medicine. However, associated changes to the university curriculum so students can become registered for clinical-based work has led to fewer students obtaining the knowledge and skills to contribute to the high performance sport industry, much to the chagrin of sporting academies and institutes.

I thank the ERDP for helping fund these visits following the conference because they yielded valuable insights will help us guide and provide appropriate careers advice and opportunities to our Sport and Exercise Science students. Yet questions often beget more questions: Should we focus on Sporting or Clinical graduate destinations for our students here at Newcastle? And if we adopt an Australian-style curriculum so that our students contribute to the rehabilitative and preventative medicine needs of our community – will the NHS and other regulatory bodies be ready for them?

Dr Brook Galna
DPD of the Sport and Exercise Science Programme

Congratulations to everyone in the Faculty who has published their research this quarter.

B Abdulmohsen, I Gharib, S McHanwell (2017).  Exploring active learning approaches to increasing student engagement through assessment and feedback”, HEA Transforming Assessment in Higher Education Case Study Series 2017- Enhancing student engagement through assessment. Case Study 12, Page 75-79. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/transforming-assessment-higher-education.

Alberti H, Atkinson J (2017), Twelve tips for the recruitment and retention of general practitioners as teachers of medical students. Medical Teacher. URL https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2017.1370082

Alberti H, Delgaty L (2017), From the UK ‘with love’:Transferring a medical curriculum to Malaysia. SEAJME (Southeast Asia Journal of Medical Education).

Bailie J, Delgaty L (2017), A systematic review of qualitative research addressing learner and educator perceptions of valuable e-learning in medical education.. AMEE.

Baqir W, Rathbone AP, Stocker A, Campbell D (2017), Foundation pharmacists in GP Practice: exploring experiences of future workforce development. Clinical Pharmacy Congress 2017.

Burford B, Medford W, Carter M, Tiffin P, Vance G, Corbett S, Shapiro E, Guilding C, Illing J (2017), The Health Education Quality Framework and National Education and Training Survey: Evidence, Evaluation and Pilot. .

Burford B, Rosenthal-Stott HES (2017), First and second year medical students identify and self-stereotype more as doctors than as students: a questionnaire study. BMC Medical Education. URL https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-1049-2

Carter M, Rothwell C, Medford W, Kehoe A, Illing J (2017), Newcastle University MBBS curriculum renewal: Report on stakeholder views. .

Delgaty L (2017), Redefining practice: challenging academic and institutional traditions with distance learning. (EJEL) Electronic Journal of E-learning.

Field J, Stone S, Orsini C, Hussain A, Vital S, Crothers A, Walsmely D (2017), Curriculum content and assessment of pre-clinical dental skills: A survey of undergraduate dental education in Europe. European Journal of Dental Education.

Hardisty J, O’Neil H, O’Connell J, Hancock R, Lucas R, Parkin L (2017) Simulating complexity: providing undergraduate students with exposure in early clinical training to the multidisciplinary management of frail older people. The Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare  http://stel.bmj.com/. 

Holmes RD (2017), No evidence to support or refute the benefits of school dental screening. Evidence-Based Dentistry. URL https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ebd.6401264

Holmes RD, Kowolik JE, Schrader SM, Waterhouse PJ (2017), The Newcastle-Indiana Experience: A Transatlantic Educational Initiative for Dental Students. IADR/AADR/CADR General Session. URL http://www.iadr.com

Keenan ID, Slater JD, Matthan JM (2017), Social media: Where are we now? Current educator usage and perceptions in higher education.

Moxham B, McHanwell S and Berkovitz B (2017).   The development of a core syllabus or oral anatomy, histology and embryology to dental students via an international Delphi panel.  Clinical Anatomy    https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.23002 .

Nazar H, Akhter N, Husband A (2017), Evaluation of a blended learning approach to teach pharmacy law. Pharmacy Education Symposium.

Nazar M, Husband A, Nazar H (2017), Medical education in the press: Read all about it!. Pharmacy Education Symposium.

Beat M. Riederer, Jean-Pierre Spinosa, Veronica Macchi, Andrea Porzionato, Raffaele De Caro, Stephen McHanwell and Bernard Moxham. (2018).   Clinically-Orientated Anatomy:  Five exemplars to portray the concept.  European Journal of Anatomy (in  press)

Rothwell C, Carter M, Medford W, Kehoe A, Illing J (2017), Newcastle University MBBS Curriculum Renewal 2017 Report for Newcastle Medical School.

Scally K, Wilson K, Linsley M, Girdler NM (2017), Formative assessment as a tool to enhance knowledge, skills and student experience in undergraduate sedation teaching. Journal of Disability and Oral Health.

St Clair-Thompson H, Graham A, Marsham S (2017), Exploring the Reading Practices of Undergraduate Students. Education Inquiry. URL https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2017.1380487

Teodorczuk A, Thomson R, Chan K, Rogers GD (2017), When I say … resilience. Medical Education. URL https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13368

Young TJ, Tullo ES, Schartner A (2017), How transculturally appropriate is person-centred communication in the care people living with dementia? Perspectives of medical students in the UK and Malaysia.. The 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA 2017). URL https://www.icahdq.org/page/Conference

Our NUAGE internship student Rachel Pearse presented the above poster at a recent meeting of the British Geriatric Society. A great example of student engagement in the teaching and evaluation process!

Dr Ellen Tullo, School of Biomedical Sciences