Student-Patient
Partnerships
One of the most memorable medical education initiatives that
I took home from the AMEE (Association of Medical Education Europe) conference this
year was the importance of the patient role in teaching medical students. I
attended two talks which outlined formal patient/teaching partnerships and was
impressed that such formal groups have been brought together to participate in
student teaching on a regular and structured basis across different specialties
in the undergraduate degree programme.
Most notable were two initiatives, the first run by the
University of Sheffield, Patients as Educators Programme https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/aume/pae_dept where an established (large) group of
patients act as regular educators across the degree course, concentrating on
the teaching of history taking, physical examination and clinical
assessment.
Equally impressive was the University of British Columbia’s
‘Patient and Community Partnership for Education’ https://pcpe.health.ubc.ca/welcome a formal organisation aiming to increase and
improve patient participation in education through patient/student mentoring,
interactive workshops, and community based research projects (amongst other
things).
So what can we learn from these and how can we embed patient
centric teaching into our GP undergraduate courses at Imperial?
You could argue that we already do this well in General
Practice as our students are based in the community and are actively encouraged
to independently consult with patients as part of several of our attachments,
including following patients with long term conditions in our Year 3 and Year 5
courses.
But could we widen our patient participation and found a
formal patient partnership group to use in teaching? How could we do this and
would it improve the student experience and improve outcomes for both patients
and students? What would be your thoughts as a GP teacher?
If you would like to share your thoughts on this please
contact me at n.engineer@imperial.ac.uk
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