On 19 Sept Stefi Barna, Stephen Gillam and Frances Mortimer met with the GMC's Ben Griffith, (Senior Policy Adviser) and Paul Buckley (Director of Education) to discuss the work of the Sustainable Healthcare Education Network. They seemed genuinely interested and supportive - they do not feel that this is a fad area or a special interest project - and they gave advice on how we might work together in future, not just for undergraduates but across all levels of medical training.
We discussed several avenues for collaboration:
1. Working group
They have asked us to write a recommendation on the priority learning outcomes within sustainability and health, and to recommend what could be expected of medical students and doctors at different levels of training (undergraduate, postgraduate and CPD). SHE will convene a working group for this and submit by end November.
2. Postgraduate training
In the short term they would be interested in building sustainability into generic learning outcomes for all the specialty training programmes at postgraduate level.
3. Continuing Professional Development Consultation
In the short term they would be interested in facilitating the topic within CPD provision. This is part of an internal discussion about making clearer recommendations for important areas of CPD, which would include sustainability, genomic medicine, etc. A consultation on CPD is running currently and SHE members should feed in to it.
4. Undergraduate training
In the medium term, they are conscious that in the 'medical training vs. medical education' debate, TD '09 emphasises competency/training but they are keen that this should not be at the expense of a broader education for medical students - 'we are training doctors for tomorrow and twenty years hence'. They may be looking at ways to broaden this out in a next round of TD.
5. Promoting good practice
While the GMC role is primarily regulatory, they are also able to promote good practice. They would be happy to highlight schools that are 'engines of innovation' in their medical school reports and the 'State of medical education' annual report. They can link to our curricula from their website, particularly if it has been endorsed by recognised bodies such as the Faculty of Public Health, RCGP. They also mentioned using SHE as a topic at their medical student 'road shows'. They are particularly interested in our approach of integrating sustainability into other aspects of the curriculum. Fruitful themes seem to be management and leadership, global health and better preparation for electives, quality improvement, responding to the unexpected, and transferable skills.
6. State of Education and the Service report
A new report on 'State of Education and the Service' will be out in a few months as guidance. SHE members may be able to feed into future (possibly annual) editions.
If you would like to be involved in any of these areas – or know someone else in your Medical School who might be interested in these developments, please get in touch, and/or contribute to the upcoming forum discussions.
Frances & Stefi
Please log in or sign up to comment.