Written by Linda de Cossart & Della Fish
View pdf of book title page, contents, foreward & back cover here
Ed4MedPrac is a principled company intent on promoting and supporting sound education for doctors that drives towards better patient care.
We aim to replace Postgraduate training in Medicine with more educational approaches to Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Clinical Practice.
The directors, Linda de Cossart, a retired Surgeon & Director of Medical Education and Della Fish (deceased) a Professor of Education, believe that the development of professionalism and sound professional judgement lie at the heart of good medical practice.
As co-director of Ed4medprac Ltd she has published widely and taught nationally and internationally with Della. She is a visiting professor at the university of Chester and is a former vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2010 for services to medicine and healthcare. enquiries@ed4medprac.co.uk
Read Della's full obituary here
Della Fish’s early career as a teacher educator, her wide knowledge of English literature and her observation of hundreds of consultants teaching in the clinical setting, underpinned her unique career as a postgraduate medical educator. Della worked with almost every healthcare profession as a teacher and an examiner to raise standards in curriculum design and development and in the activities of teaching, learning and assessment for postgraduates in the clinical setting. Her seminal book, Refocusing Postgraduate Medical Education: from the technical to the moral mode of practice, was published in 2012. She taught at Masters level in five universities and in 2015 she designed and led the development of the five new core curriculum booklets for doctors as supervisors that make up the series Medical Supervision Matters, being both the lead writer in the four main booklets, and editing the series along with Linda de Cossart and Tim Wright. Della Fish was a visiting professor at the University of Chester and from 2008, until its recent closure was an Adjunct Professor in the Education for Practice Institute at Charles Sturt University, Sydney Australia.
We stand for teaching postgraduate doctors in the moral mode of practice through worthwhile education which nurtures their Being, Doing, Knowing, Thinking and Becoming. Our core curriculum for supervisors Medical Supervision Matters attends to character education and the virtues, clinical thinking, professional judgement and reflection.
We see engaging in worthwhile education as a virtuous activity, underpinned by (implicit or explicit) understanding of what it is ‘to act educationally’. This nurtures and engages the learner in intrinsic motivation, ‘opens minds, liberates thinking, encourages critique’ (Hansen, 2000)
The values that drive ‘education’ and ‘training’ are different. Education develops understanding not just knowledge, and causes the learner to choose conduct. Training attends only to the technical aspects of medicine and changes behaviour without engaging the learner’s thinking.
Conduct refers to who we are as a person and the integrity of our ideas, thoughts, beliefs and character, values, and intentions that drive our actions. Behaviour concerns itself only with visible actions and may have been inculcated in us by others, rather than being our own.
Teaching here, as opposed to the technical mode, gives sustained intellectual and moral attention to learners, nurturing their abilities and personhood and provides opportunities for them to grow by attending to their well-being, knowing, understanding & values.
This practice involves systematic and rigorous critical enquiry into one’s professional work and one’s relationship to it. It enables doctors to explore the complexity, detail and range of their practice, and clarify their expertise and who they are as professionals.
This is about knowing who you are and what you stand for and how you define being a good person and clinician in medicine. It is about your qualities of character and what drives your practice and actions and what virtues you aspire to.
We coined this term to mean a process in which a doctor, in appraisal, provides, in a candid account, illuminating evidence of the complexity and quality of their professional practice, their integrity and the depth of their professional artistry.
This is a clinical conclusion, reached after careful clinical thinking, including careful deliberation. It is based on available evidence, and leads directly to an action (or inaction) relating to the patent’s care. It is the heart of medical practice.
Our character is revealed by how we regard and treat others and involves lifelong development. Attending to it educationally means developing virtues (stable states of character) and promoting human flourishing. (See Aristotle.) By contrast, ‘personality’ is something we are born with.
Ed4MedPrac have published a number of books that are available to purchase online.
Please contact us direct to order the Medical Supervision Matters Series or for any further information on current publications.
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