> Canonical: https://drkishanrees.com/ideas/medsin/

# MEDSIN

Coined in my Executive MBA thesis, Nottingham University Business School, 2018

**MEDSIN is the Medical Education Shared Innovation Network: the body my
Executive MBA thesis proposed so that the UK's new medical schools could
share innovation rather than reinvent it separately, school by school.** Five
new medical schools were opening at once, a once in a generation opportunity
to rethink how doctors are trained rather than replicate the existing model.
MEDSIN was the mechanism to make sure what each school learned reached all of
them.

## Where it came from

The term comes from my Executive MBA thesis, 'Recommendations for Innovation
in Medical Education: Opportunities for New Medical Schools' (Merit,
Nottingham University Business School, 2018). Here is the recommendation as
the thesis states it:

> It is important for a collegiate approach to be fostered between the new
> medical schools rather than a culture of competition, hence the major
> recommendation of this report being the formation of a Medical Education
> Shared Innovation Network (MEDSIN) administered by Health Education England
> (HEE).

The full 79-page thesis is self-hosted, with its abstract, at
[the research page](/work/research/).

## The argument

The dissertation opens from a dichotomy in the literature it reviews: fifty
years of remarkable advance in medicine itself, and a century in which the
process of medical education remained largely unaltered. Meanwhile the
National Student Survey it cites showed medical students not feeling prepared
for life working as doctors, entering an NHS environment that compounds the
problem. Medicine is a conservative, hierarchical profession; left to itself,
the dissertation argues, it does not innovate its own teaching.

New medical schools change that calculus. A school with no legacy curriculum
can build differently from day one, and five were opening at once. The risk
the thesis names is that they compete instead of collaborate, each
reinventing alone what all of them need. MEDSIN was the answer: one shared
network, administered nationally, through which innovation and best practice
flow between schools, so the experiment one school runs becomes the head
start every school gets.

Underneath the network sits the same conviction as the rest of my education
work: medical education should be individualised and patient-centred, built
around the learner and the people they will serve. It is the instinct that
built (PBL-SGT)-Fusion three years earlier, applied at the scale of
institutions rather than classrooms.

## Who it is for

Medical educators and the people who fund and regulate them first: the thesis
is a blueprint written for a specific national moment. But the shape of the
idea is not medical. Any sector that opens new institutions rarely, schools,
regulators, public bodies, gets the same once in a generation window, and
faces the same choice between competing and pooling what the new entrants
learn. That wider application is my read, not the thesis's finding; the
ledger below says so.

## What MEDSIN does not claim

A proposal is not a licence to claim adoption, so let me be precise about the
edges.

- It does not claim the network was built. MEDSIN was the major
  recommendation of a dissertation; this page makes no claim about what was
  taken up, then or since.
- It does not claim the underlying critiques as my findings. The unaltered
  century and the unprepared graduates are the dissertation's argument, built
  on published literature and the National Student Survey.
- It does not claim the new schools failed to share innovation without it.
  No follow-up study exists on this page's evidence.
- It is a proposed structure, my coinage, not an externally validated
  discipline.

## The claims, classed

I sort what I publish by how strong the claim is, so here is this page graded
by my own rubric. The classes are Observation, Hypothesis, Coined term,
Internal result and Externally validated finding; each claim names its
evidence and where that evidence comes from.

### The ledger

**The term itself, MEDSIN, the Medical Education Shared Innovation Network.**
Coined term. Evidence: the thesis, formal title above, examined and awarded
with Merit in 2018. Source: owner-supplied document, self-hosted in full at
[the research page](/work/research/); the degree award is the institutional
check.

**Medicine transformed while medical education stayed largely unaltered.**
Observation, from the literature. Evidence: the dissertation's narrative
review. Source: independent published sources as cited in the dissertation;
not re-verified for this page.

**Medical students report not feeling prepared for work as doctors.**
Observation. Evidence: the National Student Survey, as cited in the
dissertation. Source: an independent survey quoted through an owner-supplied
document; not re-verified for this page.

**A shared innovation network would serve the new schools better than
competition.** Hypothesis. Evidence: the dissertation's argument, examined
for the degree. Source: my own proposed structure, never trialled; this page
will say so until that changes.

**The once in a generation window generalises beyond medicine.** Hypothesis.
Evidence: the argument on this page. Source: my own proposed generalisation,
not yet validated.

## Watch and read

- The thesis itself: [Recommendations for Innovation in Medical
  Education](/work/research/), Executive MBA, Nottingham University Business
  School, 2018, with its abstract and the full 79-page PDF
- The classroom-scale version of the same instinct:
  [Education](/work/education/), adaptive teaching and five years as a
  Clinical Teaching Fellow

Cite as: Rees, Kishan. 'MEDSIN'. drkishanrees.com, first published 17 July 2026. https://drkishanrees.com/ideas/medsin/