Professor Peter Cantillon
INMED 2015 was a great success thanks to the excellent organisational and hosting skills of Professor Deirdre McGrath and her team at the University of Limerick. The conference was situated in the stunning surroundings of the new UL GEMS Medical School building. Over the three days of the conference the school was also being used by all of its students and staff. The constant presence of students and teachers made the conference feel very relevant and created a great buzz.
The pre-conference day included two important innovations.
The OSCE Unplugged workshop, facilitate by a group from Queen’s University Belfast, used a sociocultural, (change laboratory) research methodology as its organisational structure. it proved to be a very energising and inspiring event which we hope will lead to continuing work over many years dedicated to re-imagining clinical assessment using collaborative and participate in approaches.
The pre-conference day also saw the launch of the Irish branch of the European Association for the Study of Communication Skills in Healthcare (EACH), i-tEACH. Dr Jonathan Silverman, President of EACH and Dr Eva Doherty from RCSI led a full day workshop in which participants not only discussed the latest thinking and practices in communication skills education, but also, through their registration fee, became members of EACH.
The main conference theme of communication, culture and complexity was reflected in some thought-provoking keynote presentations by Dr Jonathan Silverman, Professor Tara Fenwick and social-media expert Dr Anne-Marie Cunningham. Jonathan spoke about the integration of what we know about communication skills education into mainstream clinical learning; Tara disentangled our sometimes messy understanding of complex social contexts and Anne-Marie took us on a journey into the social media cultural worlds that our learners inhabit. All of these presentations will be available shortly on the inmate website and can be video streamed from there.
The conference also included an excellent closed meeting between the Medical Council and the undergraduate/postgraduate medical educational institutions. The topic was accreditation and the meeting was able to generate a set of commonly agreed developments for the institutional accreditation and reaccreditation process for the Medical Council to consider.
The conference received in excess of 100 submissions with over 30 being selected for oral presentation and 40 for poster presentation.Congratulations to all the 2015 research and travel bursary winners!
INMED is also proud to announce the research and travel bursary winners for 2015 – 16. These are Gerry Gormley of Queens University Belfast who is researching the lived experience of simulated melanoma in medical students; Martina Crehan of RCSI on the lived experience of acclimatisation in first-year medical student; Leonie Heskin of RCSI who is looking at the evaluation of a new acute wound management model in surgery and Noreen O Shea of TCD who won a travel bursary to look at alternative models of clinical education in Singapore.
We will shortly be creating a page summarising many of the key messages from the conference. We will ensure that there are links to the keynote presentations they are. We will also, with presenters permission, place copies of posters and PowerPoint presentations on the website so that members can access them.
Finally, may I remind you of the recent launch of the new medical Council of Ireland/INMED research in medical education research bursaries. There are three such awards of €6000 each. The closing date for application is May 29th, 2015. Details of application are available at www.inhed.ie