Abstract
Despite the General Medical Council emphasising the value of service users to medical students’ education, there is scant literature about service user involvement in medical education. Although some research has outlined the effectiveness of service users as teachers, none has explored social issues surrounding how medical students learn ‘with’ rather than just ‘about’ service users. Incorporating insights from contemporary socio-cultural learning theory, this study examines the views and experiences of 47 stakeholders (comprising 19 service users, 13 medical students and 15 medical educators) concerning service user involvement in medical education. Eight audiotaped focus group discussions were convened and the audiotapes were transcribed. The transcripts and audiotapes were independently analysed by multiple researchers using Framework analysis. Seven content- and five process-orientated themes emerged from the analysis. Content-related themes included the costs and benefits of service user involvement in medical education and process-related themes included the use and function of humour and metaphor. In this paper, we focus primarily on the content-related themes. We discuss these findings in light of the existing service user involvement literature and contemporary socio-cultural learning theory and provide implications for further research and educational practice. We encourage educators to involve service users in medical education but only in a considered way.
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Acknowledgements
A British Academy Larger Research Grant (LRG-37523) awarded to the first author funded this research. First, we would like to thank Dr Pam Lings (previously employed as a Research Assistant at our School) for helping us to secure COREC and PMS ethics approval, conduct the focus groups, transcribe the audiotapes and analyse preliminary data. Second, we would like to thank Nicky Britten (Professor of Applied Health Care Research at our school) for her regular advice on the methodology of the research and feedback on this manuscript. Third, we would like to thank Dr Alan Bleakley (Principal Lecturer in Clinical Education at our school) for his comments on this manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank all those organisations that helped us to recruit participants and most importantly, the health and social care service users, medical students and medical educators who took part in the study.
Contributors: CR designed the study and secured its funding. CR and LK conducted the focus group discussions and all authors analysed the focus group transcripts and audiotapes. CR wrote the first draft of this manuscript but all authors contributed to its editing and revision.
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Rees, C.E., Knight, L.V. & Wilkinson, C.E. “User Involvement Is a Sine Qua Non, Almost, in Medical Education”: Learning with Rather than Just About Health and Social Care Service Users. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract 12, 359–390 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-006-9007-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-006-9007-5