Team members: Dr A. Hakim, Dr L Alsadder, Dr T. Christides, Dr W. Ricketts, Dr P. Pfeffer, Dr B. Saberwal, Dr L. Privitera, Dr Z. Samara, Dr E. Lee, Dr S Zaman, Mr H. Morgan, Ms E. Robins and Mr J. Gohil.
The Physiology team at the Institute of Health Sciences Education (IHSE) at QMUL, led by Dr A. Hakim, has collaborated with clinical colleagues from Barts NHS Trust, professional services staff at the Turnbull Centre, and academics from both QMUL campuses (London and Malta), as well as clinical teaching fellows, to support medical students' transition from classroom learning to clinical practice.
Their award winning innovative project, “Clinical Science Integration (CSI) and Preparing for Placements in Physiology labs (PPP),” focuses on boosting medical students' confidence and competence as they move from academic environments into real-world clinical settings.
CSI and PPP utilise highly interactive classroom teaching strategies in a mixed methods setting, including student-paced learning activities via QMPlus (LabPlus), to deliver clinically authentic teaching to enhance the learning experiences of medical students, whilst facilitating engagement.
The programme centres on hands-on, clinically relevant experiences to ensure students are better prepared for medical practice.
Their article this month shares their approach, results and reflection.
At the heart of our Physiology teaching, we strive to provide authentic and enriching learning experiences that not only help medical students grasp key physiological concepts, but also appreciate their application in clinical practice.
Our team created “Clinical Science Integration (CSI) and Preparing for Placements in Physiology labs (PPP)” in partnership with
QMUL CSI employs large classroom interactive teaching strategies, with over 200 students per session. These sessions incorporate online digital technologies, such as audience response systems, in a mixed methods setting. The aim is to improve engagement and boost the confidence of junior medical students. Students apply physiology to the step-by-step workup and management of virtual patients, with live and instant support from clinicians. Immediate feedback is also provided to enhance learning.
PPP adopts a small-classroom active learning approach to help nurture communities of practice and develop technical proficiency, data handling and reasoning skills in a team-based environment; these skills are highly sought in medical doctors. PPP was born out of a major collaborative syllabus project between London and the Malta Physiology medical school teams to benchmark our curriculum to General Medical Council (GMC) outcomes and practical skills. A cornerstone of this teaching approach in preparing students for placements in Physiology labs is the use of clinical-grade equipment like glucometers, ECG and peak flow devices to help students obtain and analyse clinically relevant outcomes in the safety of a lab setting, whilst making sense of these physiological readouts in the context of simulated patients.
Feedback from students has been overwhelmingly positive, with multiple citations across official student surveys. Student engagement throughout these sessions remains high: >85%, across 1-1.5 h sessions.
To date, we’ve supported over 2000 medical students to achieve a number of core GMC outcomes in practical skills, from obtaining an ECG to interpreting a urine dipstick. Importantly, this has led to an increase in partnership with clinical skills, IHSE to help design clinically authentic assessments. Moreover, the Physiology team in partnership with Turnbull Centre technicians and an e-learning technologist (LIT Team, IHSE) led the development/management of an online Physiology VLE that has recently evolved into the QM+ portal LabPlus, in 2023. Speaker invitations from the European Respiratory Society, which attracts over 20,000 delegates, and a recent publication in Advances in Physiology Education (Hakim et al, 2023) have helped to disseminate this work beyond QMUL. This success has served as a catalyst for a successful grant from the Physiological Society to support a national online symposium ‘Supporting (respiratory) Physiology teaching in a healthcare setting’. Delegates included members from the Physiological Society and clinical educators across the UK, with some representation from Institutes in Africa.
Our future plans include making use of digital tools that will help us to broadcast and develop content that can be utilised by medical students in placements.