MSc in Surgical Science and Practice

Overview 

Our aim in this module is to develop your capacity to be an educator of postgraduate doctors (including surgeons) and other clinicians. We cover the main conceptual and theoretical traditions that underpin teaching and learning. You will develop your capacity to teach and support learning using a range of modalities such as designing small group learning sessions, including using simulation; coaching and facilitation; in-the-moment and structured feedback; reflective practice. 

Over the week we challenge the climate, prevailing in some postgraduate training programmes, which sees developing clinicians as limited to training in a set of technical competences which, once assessed and validated by an examining body, produce a rounded clinician. We see the development of clinicians as greater than the accumulation of technical competences, however essential these skills are.   

As well as what a clinician can do, we explore how a rounded clinician thinks, who they are and who they are becoming.   

This view of clinician development has profound implications for the role of the clinical educator and means that during the week we attend to the importance of getting to know as individuals those you supervise, or who otherwise learn from you; we explore how you, as educator, can support the development of wise judgement; and how you can identify and support the development of those character virtues that make for better doctors and clinicians. 

Along with these fundamentals of becoming a clinical educator, the course will address how technology influences educational practice, including the implications of developments in Artificial Intelligence and the incorporation of augmented reality technology into learning.   

Run by the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences and taught in central Oxford, academic leadership for the module is by Linda de Cossart and Tom Revington. Class sizes are kept small, usually 20 or fewer, to allow interaction with tutors and exchange of experience among students. Study before and after the course is supported by online learning resources created exclusively for module participants. 

Faculty 

Recent faculty have included: 

Linda de Cossart.  Linda was a consultant vascular surgeon at the Countess of Chester hospital in England for twenty-two years and Associate Postgraduate Dean in Merseyside, England.  She is a visiting professor at the University of Chester and is a former vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.  She is author and co-author of a number of books and resources supporting the practice of clinical education. Linda was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2010 for services to medicine and healthcare. 

Tom Revington.  Tom is Course Director for the MSc in Surgical Science and Practice and PGCert in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement.  He is a departmental lecturer in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences.  He has been involved in developing and running educational programmes for healthcare practitioners since 2004. 

Aditi Siddharth.  Aditi is an obstetrics and gynaecology senior trainee completing an Oxford DPhil in the use of simulation in surgical training.  She is an experienced simulation facilitator and core faculty at Oxford’s clinical Simulation Centre, OxSTaR. 

Miranda Voss.  Miranda Voss, DPhil FCS(SA) is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Public Health, Imperial College, London. Following a first, clinical career in General Surgery that was largely spent in South Africa, she enrolled in a doctorate in Education as a mature student at the University of Oxford. She now works full time in Medical Education with the Medical Education Innovation and Research Centre, and in Undergraduate Primary Care Education at Imperial.