Partnerships in medical education: looking across disciplinary boundaries to extend knowledge

Moreover, reading this paper led us to think about the wide range of partnerships that exist within medical education, not only university/patient partnerships in delivering clinical skills teaching, but university/healthcare partnerships in delivering undergraduate programmes, and clinician/academic partners in undertaking research, to name but a few. We wondered whether there were existing definitions and categorizations that could help us to conceptualize the nature and range of partnerships in medical education. We were particularly interested in conceptualizing partnerships in a way which goes beyond serving the needs of one party, but which reflects equal reciprocity in terms of engagement and participation across parties. We found that partnerships are typically defined by at least one of the partners having something that the other partner does not have. Ideally, a partnership would be mutually beneficial. For example, in the university/healthcare partnership in delivering undergraduate medical education, the university gains access to clinical expertise and placements in return for funding. Similarly, when clinicians undertake research together with an academic partner, they might provide clinical expertise and access to practitioners and patients in return for methodological and/or analytic expertise. There are clear reciprocal relationships here, of exchanging ‘things’ with others with benefits for each party. However, in other cases, what one of the partners stands to gain is less explicit. When patients are involved in delivering clinical skills teaching, the patient provides access to a body, possibly one with signs and symptoms, for students to examine and learn from—but what are the gains for them? Sometimes the gains are financial but often they are less tangible, as per the health mentors in Langlois’ study, who potentially benefitted a much wider group of future patients when students were sympathetic to their unsatisfactory healthcare experiences and keen to be mindful of these in Emese Hall [email protected]