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Medical Education Research across a broad range of topics is currently ongoing in the Medical Education Unit, UCC. Our interests span the continuum of medical education from the undergraduate phase, through postgraduate and to continuing professional development.
Building on the findings of the National Survey of Trainee Experience; Your Training Counts (Medical Council, 2014), we are currently conducting a HRB funded study entitled Exploring Clinical Learning Environments for Postgraduate Medical Education and Training. This study aims to describe barriers and facilitators to learning in clinical workplaces, to identify priority areas for quality improvement and to produce guidelines and recommendations for the design of high quality, supportive, clinical learning environments.
Other policy relevant research currently underway has been funded by the Intern Training Network and focuses on interns? experience of the transition to practice and the quality of clinical learning environments they pass though during this time. Continuing professional development (CPD) is also a focus of our research. The Irish Network of Medical Educators have funded a project, now nearing completion, which examines doctors? attitudes towards and needs for CPD courses. Again, the aim of these studies is to inform policy and practice across the continuum of medical education.

Doctors in training who are interested in undertaking medical education research often come with research ideas based on their own first-hand experience of medical education and training. We are open to discussing whether these research ideas are translatable into a viable research project, addressing a question of importance for the wider field of medical education.

The potential project outlined here is indicative of the type of work we do, but shouldn?t be seen as prescriptive. More quantitatively oriented projects are also possible.

Title: Professional identity development in the clinical workplace
Rationale: Medical education has been characterised as a process of identity development, which involves not only gaining knowledge but also taking on attitudes, values and behaviours associated with being a doctor. Medical schools and postgraduate training bodies attempt to address these aspects through the taught curriculum; however, medical students and doctors in training are known to be strongly influenced by the hidden and informal curricula of the clinical workplace, which is often at variance with what is taught.
Aim: This project would focus on examining how clinical workplaces shape the professional identities of medical students and trainees, and exploring means to address the gap between the formal, informal and hidden curricula.
Methodology: This topic would be addressed by a qualitative dominant programme of mixed methods research, including a systematic review of the literature (e.g. realist review), surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and curricular document analysis. Discourse analysis, which examines language in use, would be applied to address the study aims.