Contents
Presenters
Margot Turner – Senior Lecturer in Diversity and Medical Education
Paper
This presentation will discuss examples of co-creation with students in order to effectively embed equity content into the medical curriculum. By empowering students from minoritized communities, we have endeavoured to amplify their voices and ensure that they are recognised and renumerated for their work.
The Medical School’s Council Active Inclusion challenging Exclusions (2021) guidance highlighted the importance of ‘involving a diverse range of students as co-creators”.
The main body of the presentation will demonstrate the importance of co-creating with students as a means of working towards decolonising and humanising the clinical curriculum, using an intersectional approach. The literature on co-creation emphasises that this strategy “can support formulation for change and professional development for teachers and learners” (Konings et al, 2021), which is relevant to all educators within our institution.
The presentation will provide a series of illustrated examples of how we have worked with students to identify gaps in the curriculum, humanise the portrayal of patients and healthcare workers and create materials which address the needs of diverse and marginalised patients.
This includes creating new course material to reflect the diversity of our patient and healthcare communities, and training students to deliver teaching in partnership with faculty. We will also be describing the development of Mind the Gap, the Trans MOOC and a series of short, filmed scenarios we have designed with students to prepare them on how to tackle racism on clinical placement. We will also describe our latest partnership in the curriculum with Black students and mothers to acknowledge high Black maternal mortality rates during childbirth and the postnatal period (MBRRACE-UK, 2025), and our work in creating fictional lived experience scenarios of health care professionals that have overcome difficulties and continued to deliver excellent care to patients.
We will discuss the importance of not adding an extra burden to minoritized students and making sure that their work is compensated and formally acknowledged. We would like to think about the way forward and make suggestions about how this work could be embedded more widely.
References
1. Active-inclusion-challenging-exclusions-in-medical-education.pdf
2. Könings KD, Mordang S, Smeenk F, Stassen L, Ramani S. Learner involvement in the co-creation of teaching and learning: AMEE Guide No. 138. Med Teach. 2021 Aug;43(8):924-936.
3. Maternal mortality 2021-2023 | MBRRACE-UK | NPEU
