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Nottingham experts receive prestigious funding to train future medics

Tuesday, 22 June 2021

A research project looking at using virtual patients to reduce errors in diagnosis has received prestigious funding for a PhD programme from the ASME (Association for the Study of Medical Education.

Located at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, the winning project will investigate the effectiveness of personalised self-regulated learning enhanced feedback using virtual patients on clinical reasoning among early medical and physician associate students.

Supervisors include Dr Rakesh Patel and Doctor Christopher Madan at the University of Nottingham, along with Professor John Sandars and Professor Jeremy Brown of Edge Hill University.

It’s a privilege to receive this funding from ASME with our partners from Edge Hill University. ASME Awards support a lot of new and early careers educators and researchers, so it’s great to do our bit within the University by sharing our expertise in medical education, clinical reasoning and developing technology-enhanced learning interventions in this PhD. It’s also great for this award to acknowledge our patient and public involvement partner Isabel Healthcare, who have co-designed our Isabel-EPIFFANY elearning platform with us. We hope this award is another step towards training further healthcare professionals minimise diagnostic error and keeping patients safe in our NHS.”
Dr Rakesh Patel, Clinical Associate Professor in Medical Education at the University of Nottingham, and lead researcher on this project

At its core, the PhD programme aims to improve clinical reasoning among early medical and physician associate students. The chosen candidate will explore how a virtual patient platform helps medical educators assess their students’ clinical knowledge.

They can also identify core self-regulated learning thinking required before, during and after making a diagnosis.

The PhD candidate will have the opportunity to develop the personalised feedback approach used by the platform and investigate how useful it is for both students and teachers. Moreover, they will link this approach to students’ clinical knowledge and core self-regulated learning thinking skills. Over the course of several cases, the researchers hope to be able to connect the relative importance of each component of feedback to the approach’s effectiveness.

ASME Director of Awards Professor Karen Mattick said: “We’re delighted to announce the award of our fourth ASME PhD studentship. This award aims to promote high quality research into medical education and help to secure a career pipeline of talented medical education researchers nationally and internationally.

“The PhD project funded this year explores feedback for early medical and physician associate students on their clinical reasoning and we hope the findings will inform undergraduate health professions education and, ultimately, improve healthcare practice.”

The chosen candidate will receive a stipend, as well as support with the cost of consumables required for the research. ASME will also cover the registration cost to present the work at the Annual Scholarship Meeting

 

CharlotteAnscombe
Charlotte Anscombe - Media Relations Manager - Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
Email: charlotte.anscombe@nottingham.ac.uk
Phone: 0115 748 4417
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