Endocrine Abstracts

I am committed to undergraduate and postgraduate education. As Endocrinology course lead, Imperial College Medical School, I have designed a course to consolidate key principles of Endocrine pathology and physiology. Clinical reasoning is a cornerstone of clinical practice and a key learning requirement in undergraduate medical education. I have focused on developing clinical reasoning skills throughout the Endocrinology course using interactive clinical cases. The students have consistently voted this course as the most popular in the early undergraduate years of the medical school. One of the challenges I have faced is maintaining student engagement and enthusiasm in a large student cohort. In 2015, I received the Society for Endocrinology Undergraduate Achievement Award to introduce Team Based Learning (TBL) in the Endocrinology course. Breaking down a large student cohort into ‘teams’ provides an opportunity for students to apply knowledge to answer questions and make collaborative decisions in interactive teaching sessions. TBL has been enormously successful, with excellent student feedback. I shared this innovation in an article for ‘The Endocrinologist’ in 2016. I am Head of Year 1, BSc in Biomedical Sciences at Imperial College, a new degree course which emphasises early development of laboratory skills. To increase confidence in the laboratory, particularly in team working and practical skills, I have developed ‘The Biomedical Kitchen’. This is a new inter-departmental collaboration, drawing on parallels between cookery and science to support students starting in the molecular laboratory. In 2014 I designed and delivered the first annual Imperial Pituitary Masterclass, a multidisciplinary meeting to share best practice and explore challenging areas in pituitary disease. Many Endocrinology postgraduate trainees attend this meeting and are encouraged to present pituitary cases of interest. I received an Endocrine Network Grant from the Society for Endocrinology in 2018 to facilitate the development of the Masterclass as a national meeting.