Contributor: Shafiq-Ali Rizwan PradhanDepartment: School of Medicine and Dentistry
The General Medical Council (GMC) outlines its expectations of the medical student in the ‘Outcomes for Graduates (formerly known as Tomorrow’s Doctors). In this document, the newly qualified doctor is described as a scholar or scientist, practitioner and a professional.
As the educator of students, the medical school plays an integral role in providing the resources and environment which will allow easy transition of the undergraduate student into a competent doctor with skill-set to fulfil the three fundamental roles outlined above. In addition, it is a requirement by the GMC for the medical school to provide a sound learning environment and culture. Medical schools have also been made responsible for the support of students i.e. through the provision of confidential counselling, careers support and occupational health services.
It is therefore transparent that the role of the medical school clearly extends much further than acting as a port of knowledge for simple delivery of the core curriculum. In reality, the medical school must act as supportive platform that enables its students own personal development to allow them to recognise and achieve their maximum potential.
In order to successfully climb up the career ladder, each medical trainee must not only fulfil the basic clinical qualifications but must also carry a portfolio of other academic extracurricular competencies and achievement from undergraduate studies through to specialist training and beyond. More importantly, the increasingly competitive nature of post-graduate training posts in all fields of medicine will implicitly demand a higher quantity of extra-curricular academic achievements from its applicants to show demonstration of commitment to a specialty from a very early stage of l training. This therefore increases pressure on students to start building a suitable portfolio from an undergraduate level in order to enter career pathways of their choice in the future. Students need to have an insight of the realistic expectations of the job and entry requirements for the career in mind. In order for this to take place successfully, a robust and fully functioning support system and careers advice service needs to be in place. Students must also be able recognise their own potential with a chance to explore their own strengths and weaknesses with support from senior members of staff Information and access to portfolio enhancing extra-curricular academic opportunities should also be made available.
Many efforts have been made by the medical faculty at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry to provide students with adequate support on careers advice, academic and pastoral support. Yet there are certain limitations to the current system in place. In an attempt to deal with this problem, faculty members and a few medical students collaborated. An initial brainstorm highlighted the following issues:
In a similar layout to QMPlus, the online student resource centre, the BL Careers and Personal Development portal was therefore developed. The end aim of this portal is three-fold:
The BLPD portal consists of the following categories:
Development of the BLPD page brought up some interesting challenges from a technical point of view. We started with an idea which envisaged a timeline containing links to information that Students would need throughout their year at different times, such as links to resources on preparing for a clinical skills session before their first timetabled session.
While the idea was there, trying to develop it on QMPlus proved to be too complicated and the end result was a course page with 50 sections, one for each week in the academic year. On top of this, the design of the page looked vastly different to current pages on QMPlus that student were already familiar with, thereby risking low usage of the page in the long run.
Instead we opted for a familiar 3×3 image grid linking to the above mentioned sections, removing the collapsible sections altogether.
BLPD QMplus page
The individual sections had content from different departments of the medical school, and so part of the time allocated for this project was spent meeting with various members of staff to determine what they wanted their page to contain and what it would look like. All staff were very keen on the idea and had a good idea of what they wanted in their page, some requested to have more than just information on the page, and asked for sections where students could interact with the content or department. For example, the research opportunities pages have a full application system built into the subpage. This consisted of a jot-form form appearing in a light box where staff could submit new research opportunities. One of the staff members would then proof the submission and place it as a new topic on the current opportunities forum. From there, there was another jot-form (again in a light box) which students could bring up to apply for the research opportunity they wanted to work with.
Access for systems like this was crucial to having it on the page. We had to restrict what students could access and do on the system. For example, the form to submit new opportunities was “hidden” on QMPlus which meant while students could not see it or use it, staff members were able to insure the button and submit the information. The forums too had custom permissions put on them, in the case of the research opportunities, stunners were able to reply to topics (in this case each topic was a research opportunity) but they were not able to create a new topic. Once the research was complete, the topic would then be moved to the completed forum, where no replies were allowed at all.
As this was a large site to create, which had and will still have continual involvement and management but numerous departments, I had to devise a way to teach staff how to use their specific pages without taking up too much of the allocated time. I ended up creating screen recordings with a voiceover by myself going over the page and showing how to use each page’s functions.
So far this has been accepted very well by the various departments, with some commenting on the innovation used to teach the staff. The advantage of the videos is that they are always available and can always be referred to if needed, no more written instructions that can be lost! However written instructions and one-to-one meetings were offered if staff wanted them to understand their page. Each page has its own video which is found at the top of the respective page, again hidden so only staff can see and refer to them.
Overall the creation of BLPD has been incredibly rewarding and has been educational for me, allowing for more understanding of a custom Moodle solution and the limitations and workarounds that had to be figured out to create a solution that was required. I look forward to many more like it!