Working with the AcaMedic students to produce research

This blog post is written by Melvyn Jones (A Clinical Associate Professor in General Practice), Surinder Singh (a Clinical Senior Lecturer at PCPH), and See Chai Carol Chan and Jack Shi Jie Yuan (both medical students).

This summer a very slowly gestating project came to fruition with the publication in the BMJopen of a study exploring the influences at medical schools on students with respect to GP career choices (see here). Surinder Singh and myself quite a few years ago (2017) thought that an anthropological approach using our students to capture these drivers of student carer choice might be quite a useful addition to the field, on the back of the NHS Wass report “By choice not by chance”.  At the same time the AcaMedics group (a multi institutional collaboration to support students developing research skills) was looking for potential projects. We set our plans and were lucky to be selected by two highly able UCL medical students (Jack Shi Jie Yuan  and See Chai Carol Chan) to work on the project.  Meanwhile across London at Imperial a very similar project was being undertaken.  It took Sophie Park to join the dots and make this a cross institutional project- key to improving the generalisability of our findings.

Getting ethics was tricky though.  Would we need consent to use quotes from someone making pejorative comments about general practice as a career?  Clearly this would never happen, but thankfully the ethics committee agreed that the anonymised observation and reflection occurring away from the clincal setting was acceptable.

Rolling forward via presentations and posters at the UCL Education conference in 2018, the Trainees in the Association for the Study of Medical Education (TASME 2018)  and SAPC Madingley hall conference helped us shape our thinking.  Writing workshops helped refine our argument. However, publication proved much more difficult with a straight rejection and then a very long drawn out peer review, eventually leading to another rejection.   A key motivation for our students was to have something to put in their publication box on their NHS junior doctor Foundation Programme application, but by this stage they had all graduated and moved on.  It took a final push by Ravi Parekh at Imperial assisted by myself and Surinder to have a good fresh look at the manuscript, the data and the peer reviews and to decide it was with another go.  So in the summer 2021 it finally appeared.

What are the messages from the study?   Some of the findings were there before- students feeling a GP career was the default, the fall back position. For students used to competing for everything this seems like defeat. The interesting observation was the student’s perception of the internalised process of being a primary care physician. The fact that the GP sits and the patient comes to them was perceived as being too passive to students used to the swarm of the ward round buzzing around hospitals. The internal process of thinking about clinical decisions such as how to balance treating a patient’s heart failure without worsening their kidney function or making them fall over as their blood pressure drops, was invisible to the students. It was only when the students were sitting in the consulting hot seat did they begin to see the considerable intellectual challenge to many primary care consultations.   But were they exposed to “bad mouthing” of general practice?  Yes to some extent, but interestingly they were also exposed to hospital clinicians who talked up the role of general practice and the challenges to doing it well.

It was always challenging for students to undertake their own research project (see here). However it is a great shame that students appear to be completely marginalised since Covid when it comes to undertaking research projects. Recent new guidance from the NHS Research Authority prevents undergraduates from conducting research.  Thus, perhaps the ultimate conclusion for our study – which has come to light after publication – is that we’re faced with far fewer opportunities to prepare and encourage the next generation of would-be researchers.

Working with students on research projects is a however great experience but the time frame for ethics and sluggish peer review processes can be a real issue when they have fixed deadlines like revising for finals, moving on as junior doctors and the almost complete lack of headspace to think about research when they are enveloped in working as an NHS foundation doctor.  Find a project however, with a realistic outcome and timeframe and you will find a rich seam of motivated talented individuals who are keen to contribute.