‘Contact with real situations is a unique opportunity for clinical learning, but developing and supporting the educational experience alongside the demands of the workplace is a challenge,’ Dr Kay Mohanna, director of Postgraduate Medicine, School of Medicine, Keele University, UK, said during a workshop at the University of Health Sciences (UHS) on Monday.
The theme of the 5-day workshop is “Supporting Clinical Learning in the Workplace”, and it is a part of UHS initiative to launch training programmes for general practitioners (GPs) in a bid to strengthen family medicine as an institution in Pakistan. Dr Mohanna is on the National Council for the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) and chairs the Midland RCGP with expertise in primary care, medical education and appraisal and career support. The aim of the workshop is to support excellence in clinical leadership by developing educational opportunities, carrying out research and supporting practitioners in their workplace, enabling the development of clinicians as knowledgeable and effective leaders and facilitating the development of high performing clinical service teams. Dr Mohanna said clinical education was located in the workplace–out-patient departments, hospital wards, general practice clinics, emergency departments and operating theatres–where students, doctors and patients came together in the conjoint pursuit of clinical care and learning. “Doctors learn from experience, which we define as authentic, real human contact that helps them learn about health, illness and disease, and how to be a doctor,” she said adding that there were good reasons for shifting the workplace educational focus from teaching to learning. She was of the view that the subject matter learned from clinical encounters went far beyond what doctors were explicitly taught as medical students. Emphasising the need of experience-based learning, she said it reframed clinical teaching as supporting participation. “Clinical teachers help student to participate–and challenge them–by supporting them”, she said adding that experience based learning placed young doctors’ participation in practice at the centre of their progression from a novice to a qualified doctor, who could make a difference to humanity.
