CUREMeDE welcomes CUROP student

This summer CUREMeDE welcomes Jennifer Coventry to undertake a CUROP research project with us.

Her project is looking at how medical students’ perceptions of what makes a ‘good’ doctor compare with the perceptions of different kinds of doctors.

Jenny is a medical student at Cardiff University who has spent this year intercalating in medical education, taking time out of her course to explore academia and research in the field. She completed her intercalating research project with CUREMeDE, looking into medical students’ beliefs regarding what makes a 'good' doctor, with her personal highlights including conducting focus groups with Broad Based trainees and making a presentation of results at the upcoming Association of the Study of Medical Education conference.

Over the coming weeks Jenny will be comparing her existing data on what medical students perceive a good doctor to be with data collected from a variety of doctors answering the same question. The data from each group will be examined separately and then combined to see if the results change. From this she hopes to develop suggestions to improve undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. Jenny is particularly looking forward to writing a report and a research paper and developing her statistical analysis skills.

This project is particularly timely as currently there is a lack of literature and research on this topic. More broadly, the challenges of an ageing population developing multiple health conditions calls for an analysis of how medical education can be adapted to better suit evolving patient needs.

CUREMeDE are currently in the process of evaluating a new postgraduate training scheme called the Broad Based Training (BBT) programme. Jenny’s CUROP project will contribute to this evaluation by assessing whether different postgraduate pathways train or attract different 'types' of doctors. The 2013 Shape of Training Review into medical education called for more doctors to be trained as generalists rather than specialists. CUREMeDE’s evaluation will look into whether medical students, doctors and patients agree with this.