Hello folks I'm delighted today to be joined by
Dr John Mckeown head of GP teaching and Dr Naomi Dow who is a GP and Senior clinical lecturer both
from the University of Aberdeen They are going to be speak to us today about how they've used Near
Me to facilitate student learning and I'm going to be asking them about how that's the impact
that's been on them as lecturers in terms of the capacity for students but also the impact
on the students in terms of their capability Can you just briefly describe how you've been using
Near Me with your students yeah thanks thanks for having us today Marc so we began using Near Me
as a teaching tool last year for our year three medical students and we have used it as a kind
of I guess a stepping stone for the students from practicing consultations with patient partners
into consulting real patients in real life and the Near Me has been a great tool for us to do
this by using video consultations, live streaming them into the classroom and allowing students to
actually sit in the driving seat and take part in these consultations themselves.
So yes so John
just tell us here what's the impact being on you in terms of a teaching team and the capacity.
I think like a lot of universities in Scotland and presumably across the UK and potentially you
know globally we're facing a workforce crisis in the NHS and part of a solution to that has been
support from the government increasing student numbers that's fine in principle but what we're
now looking for is teaching capacity really, whether it's teaching spaces or tutors to teach
and what Near Me has allowed us to do is to find an innovative way of looking at capacity without
necessarily having to find a room space for or multiple numbers of tutors and the key thing
for us was when we looked into the session the students gained significant value from it in terms
of teaching analogous to face of face teaching. and now we spoke before some of the students come
with some really nice quotes about the impact had on them in terms of a novel new way of teaching
and how they viewed it.
Can you share with us some of that? Yeah one of the comments from the
students and I hope I get this right not do it a disservice really and the students identified
that the session was very much transformational they they went through range of emotions in the
session dealt with lots of different concepts of uncertainty and they felt the session was
authentic and one of the students described as a transformational step where previous his teaching
had been like riding a bike with kind of training wheels on and then the student felt that this
session was very much like being supported by a tutor ready to go to the next step and many felt
that next year he'd be able to kind of push off on his own in cycle without a training wheels of
tutor support really so he saw it as a really stepping stone from being very much supported
to guiding him to independent practice really which was exactly what we were looking for from
a session.
That's great to hear and again how does this model compare to maybe previous models
you've used or currently used like for scenarios or things that been pre-recorded? I think this
using Near Me has got a number of advantages so the first is that it's using real patients
and real consultations these are not scripted, the patients are obviously consented beforehand
but their consultation is authentic it is the students doing the consultation this isn't
a repeat after the GP having done it so from that aspect I think it's very very different for
the students this is, it's a surprise what comes up in the consultation and there certainly have
been some surprises in the in the sessions that we've used so far and so moving away from the kind
of patient partner the kind of simulated patient model into the the real real life General Practice
has been really valuable for the students as John mentioned as well in terms of capacity using Near
Me's got advantages in terms of how many students we can have in a teaching session whilst still
providing a really valuable experience for them so we've been managing to have larger groups
of students in the the consultations than we would ever manage physically in a practice
in in the consulting room we've found Near Me really very straightforward to use I think
as clinicians we've all got experience of using Near Me within our clinical work and there's
really just some minor adaptations to use it as teaching tool we've received good guidance from
yourselves as well as from the University data protection team to ensure that we're using it in
the correct manner and certainly our experience is that the tutors both on campus as well as the GP
tutors in practice have have found it very simple and straightforward to use.
I think can probably
add to that but the students are able to clearly identify the difference between simulated
scripted scripted teaching and this really authentic experience of actually dealing with real
patients in real practice consulting with real problems and when we evaluated afterwards it was
really striking how much the students felt that this was a realistic you know challenging scenario
and their emotional response to it was as if they were there with the students so I guess we would
have had initial concerns talking about remote consultations as to whether it was going to feel
genuine to students but the outcome the outcomes really really did support the fact that students
had a genuine clinical encounter with a patient that day. Thanks very much John and Naomi for
sharing that with us this afternoon if you want more information regarding Near Me and how to set
it up to use with students there's a link to some resources below and we'll look forward to seeing
you again another one of our videos thank you and goodbye