#	Pagina
attuale pagina	/open-h2020/projects/200718/results.html

Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DigitalDoctors (Making Clinical Sense: A comparative study of how doctors learn in digital times)

Teaser

Summary

Digital technologies are reconfiguring medical practices in ways we still donâ€™t understand. This research project is examining the impact of the digital in medicine by studying the role of pedagogical technologies in how doctors learn the skills of their profession. It focuses on the centuries-old skill of physical examination; a sensing of the body, through the body. Increasingly medical students are learning these skills away from the bedside, through videos, simulated models and in laboratories.

My research team is interrogating how learning with these technologies impacts on how doctors learn to sense bodies. Through the rich case of doctors-in-training the study addresses a key challenge in contemporary life regarding how technologies, particularly those digital and virtual, are implicated in bodily, sensory knowing of the world.

Our research takes a historically-attuned comparative anthropology approach, advancing the social study of medicine and medical education research in new directions. First, a team of three ethnographers have conducted fieldwork in Tamale (Ghana), Maastricht (the Netherlands) and Budapest (Hungary) attending to both spectacular and mundane technologies in medical education, recognising that everyday learning situations are filled with technologies old and new. This is the first comparative social study of medical education. The study also brings historical and ethnographic research of technologies closer together, with a historian now conducting oral histories and archival research at each site.

Findings of this project will advance understanding of how the digital and other technologies are implicated in skills learning. In this study we are developing novel digital-sensory methodologies and boldly, aim to develop new theories of perception. These academic contributions will have very practical relevance to society by improving the training of doctors in digital times.

Work performed

Progress on the project has been excellent. The complete research team has been assembled and we are already far exceeding expectations in some aspects, such as our advances in unconventional methodologies and our interdisciplinary developments with the field of medical education.

Ethnographic fieldwork has been completed on time, with no set-backs and with very positive engagements with those in our fieldsites. Historical work has begun, with exciting connections already developing with the ethnographic studies.

We have also held our first project workshop which was a great success. The format was highly innovative, involving hands-on events, engagement with the public and a writing workshop organized by PhDs for PhDs.

Due to the qualitative nature of this project, incorporating long term ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories and archival research, significant work in the early stages of this project went into strengthening connections with our researched communities in order to make the research possible. Thus, one of our biggest achievements to date has been the smooth, timely running of fieldwork and the excellent rapport established with those in the field. More tangible achievements, such as publications, are mostly either in progress or planned for the second half of the study.

That said, we recently had a paper published in an open access medical education journal which is the first to report from our fieldwork. The article has already been viewed and downloaded many times, and elicited an engaging commentary in the journal.

Final results

With the successful and timely completion of ethnographic fieldwork at the three fieldsites - which was risky in that it involved careful ethical considerations, depended on delicate negotiations with local interlocutors and good communication and collaboration among team members - we have built the necessary foundation for the first comparative social study of medical education. The addition now of the historical arm of the project uniquely brings together historical and ethnographic research to extend beyond the state of the art in the field of social studies of medicine, promising to contribute and offer new theoretical insights as hoped.

The developments we have made together in innovative methodologies, particularly those of a comparative, collaborative nature, using digital and sensory techniques, offers a strong contribution to team based social research, with insights which will be relevant not only to the fields of history and anthropology, but also collaborative social sciences and humanities projects more broadly.

Our significant progress in building bridges with the field of medical education will yield results which will have impact in our own fields, as well as in medical education, and we have solid grounds for thinking that this will have an influence upon the way that doctors will be trained in the future. We have built the necessary networks and collaborations to help achieve this goal, and have many publications planned and in progress, including articles, chapters and books, as well as videos and other material for non-academic audiences, through which we will disseminate results.