October 10, 2022, by mszrm4

Nottingham MedEd team attend AMEE 2022 in Lyon, France

 

Dr Rebecca McConnell reflects on her first AMEE conference experience

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Nottingham faculty, students and alumni visited Lyon at the end of August this year to attend the AMEE annual conference – along with thousands of other medical educationalists from around the world. And even more people attended online as they made the conference “hybrid” with a number of sessions livestreamed to virtual attendees.

AMEE 

AMEE describes itself as an “international association for health professions education” and hosts an annual conference which “anyone who is anyone” (my words😉) in medical education attends, so I thought I’d make my first trip to AMEE in Lyon (and I have a friend to visit in Lyon too).

The “Palais de Congres” in Lyon (Conference Centre) is between the river and a lovely park, but the conference timetable ran from 8am until 6pm every day!!!!  So we didn’t get a lot of spare time to explore the surroundings.

There were a vast number of seminar and workshops to choose from during the conference but they tended to be organised in “tracks” so that different interests were covered in each workshop session with topics such as clinical skill teaching, faculty development, assessments.

As a clinician only involved in postgraduate education and faculty development there were opportunities for me to attend a variety of workshops and plenaries. Below, I will reflect on a couple of sessions that I attended:

Clinical Educator Milestone project (from ACGME, a USA MedEd organisation)

The team from ACGME ran a workshop under the “faculty development” theme and described how they had developed the “milestones” project – a developmental framework for clinical educators to support continuous professional development. We then went through a case study in groups. I got to work with some Danish and Swedish educators and it was interesting to learn about what is similar and what is different in their countries. The milestones project describes skills, attitudes and knowledge with descriptors of different levels of competence. It reminded me very much of the capabilities descriptors for GP trainees in the UK, or the AdvanceHE descriptors for higher education teaching.

I think it is a useful (and freely available document online) for all health professions educators who are struggling to create some PDP (personal development plans) for next year or for uncovering the “unknown unknown” blind spots in our personal development needs.

“6 types of literature review explained”

I recognised several names from the list of people running this workshop – a “who’s who” of medical education reviews!! 😉 And it was unsurprisingly a very full room – I was the last person allowed in! The team described 6 types of literature reviews and we had to discuss in our groups what kind of research question would suit each.

I went to the session to learn more about reviews, as part of my role is supervising masters dissertations and sometimes my students chose to write reviews. It was an useful session and the main thing I took away from it is the link to the series that academics have written (and are still writing) in the Journal of Graduate medical Education – link to it here – which I will be passing on to all my MedEd students considering doing a review of some kind for their Master’s degree.

Team building

One of the nicest aspects of the conference was getting to spend more time with colleagues from my own institution, and some of their collaboration colleagues from around the world. Especially since Covid, the opportunity to bump into work colleagues in the staffroom/ corridor etc. has been reduced as we work from home more and so we only “meet” the people that we actively arrange to meet. 

I got to meet a colleague that I had only contacted via email before and thereby met some of their colleagues they had collaborated with around the world. We also met up to eat in the evenings and learn about the different workshops that we had all been to throughout the day. 

 

So, I really do recommend that you consider attending AMEE or other conferences to meet people from inside and outside your institution. Next year’s AMEE annual conference is in Glasgow, UK, so maybe I will see some of you there? 

Dr Rebecca McConnell, MA, BMBS, MRCGP, MMedSci – is a GP, GP Trainer, GP Appraiser and Clinical Associate Professor in Medical Education at the University of Nottingham.

She is module convenor for the optional module “Coaching Mentoring & Supervision” on the Nottingham Masters and PGDip course in medical education.

 

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Join us on the Nottingham MedEd course: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pgstudy/course/taught/medical-education-mmedsci

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