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# Recommendations for Innovation in Medical Education: Opportunities for New Medical Schools

Executive MBA (Merit), Nottingham University Business School, 2018

MEDSIN: a shared innovation network for the UK's new medical schools.

### In plain English

The UK was opening a wave of new medical schools, and my MBA thesis argued this was a once in a generation opportunity to rethink how doctors are trained rather than replicate the existing model. It proposed MEDSIN, the Medical Education Shared Innovation Network, to be administered by Health Education England, so that new schools could share innovation instead of reinventing it separately.

The underlying argument: medical education should be individualised and patient-centred, built around the learner and the people they will serve.

### Abstract & Supervisors

Over the last fifty years the rate of advance within medicine has been quite remarkable (Le Fanu, 1999). With this healthcare has become increasingly complex (Rouse and Serban, 2014) and the associated risk to patients when things go wrong has also increased (Makary and Daniel, 2016). There is an interesting dichotomy in that by and large the process of medical education has remained largely unaltered for the past century (Flexner, 2002). Medicine is an inherently conservative profession based on a hierarchical structure, so when left up to the profession to introduce innovation within medical education such change has not been forthcoming.

Given the current climate within both the NHS and higher education institutions, which will be explored throughout this dissertation, a situation has arisen where medical students and patients have an increasingly powerful voice. Medical students generally are not happy and don't feel prepared for life working as doctors, as evidenced by The National Student Survey (NSS). When they graduate and start working in what is a difficult NHS environment the situation is compounded by the fact they are not appropriately skilled to complete certain tasks. This may lead to issues with the care patients receive. When this is coupled with an increasingly pressurised working environment and patients being encouraged to publicly rate their doctors online it creates a challenging environment for doctors to work in.

This report will consider how the medical education process can be refined to better suit the needs of medical students going through the system, with the intention of maximising their time spent in medical school, in order to equip them with the skills, knowledge, attitudes and approach to learning that will help them prosper as doctors and integrate within multidisciplinary teams such that excellent patient care can be provided. With the formation of five new medical schools, this represents a unique opportunity to shape medical education in a way that leads to improvements in patient safety and quality of care in the longer term. In order to maximise this opportunity a co-ordinated approach where best practice is shared between the new medical schools would be beneficial. 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).

This report looks to maximise and spread that benefit, initially nationally and eventually internationally, by providing a blueprint for implementing innovative approaches to medical education. This is a blueprint which puts patients at the heart of the medical education process and equips students with the skills, attitudes and an approach to learning that serves as the foundation to the rest of their career. This is somewhat of a departure from the traditional didactic paternalistic approach to medical education. There is definitely a changing dynamic between the public and the medical profession. The rise of expert patients and their access to medical knowledge coupled with patients also generating their own health data means medical education must evolve if we are to equip medical students with the skills required for their future careers. This dissertation proposes the way to facilitate that evolution is via introducing improvements via the incorporation of innovative approaches to medical education from the beginning of students' education in new medical schools.

Supervisors: [Prof Simon Mosey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-mosey-9a8aa/), [Prof Hannah Noke](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-noke-35a1a311/)