"Getting Started..." a practical guide for clinical teachers
Doctors usually enjoy the opportunity to teach undergraduate medical students, but sometimes we all need a bit of help to get us started! This series of guides provides background information on clinical teaching in different situations and practical tips on how to make the most of our role as clinical teachers. (click here for advert)
Copies in PDF format are available on CD (containing all 15 booklets) at £23
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Measuring Educational Environment in the Health Professions
Sue Roff and Sean McAleer work with a wide variety of medical and healthcare profession educators in developing and validating reliable measures of the educational environment in undergraduate, postgraduate and specialty areas. Several instruments are available, including the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure and the Postgraduate Hospital Educational Environment Measure and there is a steady research literature appearing in MEDLINE about these instruments.

Dundee Polyprofessionalism Project
All the health professions are now concerned with Fitness to Practice standards in undergraduate programmes. In this era of Polyprofessionalism in the health care professions, it may be that teaching/learning and assessing polyprofessionalism should be staged into a continuum of phases.
pre-clinical (whilst accepting that all healthcare students now have earlier access to patients or simulated patients)
early clinical ‘proto-professional’
autonomous practitioner

Our goal is to develop a suite of robust, feasible and cost-effective sequenced teaching and assessment techniques that amount to a progress test, while also involving reflection and self assessment as well as peer assessment. It is important that the teaching and the assessment should be normed to consensus standards of Professionalism in the context in which they will be applied.

One PHD and one MMedEd student are already working in the project, under joint supervision from the Centre for Medical Education and the Dental School. The first inventory is about to be piloted in the Dundee Nursing, Medicine and Dentistry population and the second is in development. They have been informally welcomed by a senior member of the GMC Council as “of great importance in developing robust assessments [that] will be needed as we seek to take forward the development of the generic elements of all curricula starting later this year.”