Held on the 3rd February 2017, Centre for Professional Development, University of Birmingham Medical School

Present: Angela Rowlands (Chair), Jon Ward, Shuangyu Li, Riya George, Jia Liu, Hannah Condry, Adrian Barrowdale and Judith Caboche

1. Apologies: Nisha Dogra, Enam-ul-Haque, Candan Ertubey, Pete Leftwick, Margot Turner, Wendy Lowe, Barry Ewart, Rebecca Farrington and Kam Bhui

2. Minutes from the last meeting

• Agreed as a true record

3. Matters arising and action points from the last meeting

• Discussion around offering training workshops to medical institutions was explored during the meeting and will be addressed further in the minutes under ‘engaging membership and training.’
• Enam’s request for further podcasts was raised in the meeting, it was agreed that existing podcasts and videos made for the twitter chats should be made available on the DIMAH website. Jon Ward arranged for video recordings for pod casts to be made during the DIMAH meeting for members who wished to do so.

4. Membership updates

• Current members: Angela presented a report received from Pete. 46 members have joined DIMAH with a total of £620.00 pounds present in the DIMAH account.
• Challenges: Discussion around the challenges individuals were experiencing in gaining institutional membership was addressed and other suggested options to gaining membership were explored during the meeting. These included allowing individuals to join online via pay-pal and/or asking individuals to pay via their personal accounts and then seek reimbursement from their institutions at a later date when available funding has been arranged. It was recognised that Pete may have already explored some of these options.
• Encouraging membership: Reviewed previous action point regarding contacting institutional members who attended the May 2016 DIMAH conference that have yet to become DIMAH members.

Following action points remain:

Action:

• Shuangyu Li & Pete Leftwick: University of Sheffield
• Candan Ertubey: Newcastle Medical School
• Angela Rowlands: had contacted Leeds University and they had now joined
• Judith Caboche: Plymouth University (Awaiting financial budget to gain institutional membership)
• Riya George & Enam-ul-Haque: Exeter University, East Anglia University and Hull & York
• Nisha Dogra: Cardiff University, Keele University, Edinburgh University, Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Royal Colleges.

5. Engaging membership and training

• Twitter chats: Riya reported feedback on the two twitter chats that were jointly organised with Enam. Both twitter discussions were successful, with a total of 20 individuals participating in the discussions, which included a few individuals from abroad and within the NHS. Key learning
  experiences from the two discussions included a.) Importance of having two facilitators to host the twitter chats b.) Explore strategies for engaging individuals outside of DIMAH to participate in the twitter discussions, as the large majority of participants were from DIMAH c.) Arrange and discuss before-hand in the DIMAH sessions what associated questions should be asked in the twitter chat.
• Discussion around the next twitter chat which Shuangyu agreed to host with Riya and Enam, this included potential topics and suggestions for involving more participation from outside of DIMAH. Jon Ward suggested the next twitter discussion be around “positive aspects of diversity in the world” and suggested whether the twitter chat could be arranged for the late afternoon (after 4.30pm) and Judith Caboche proposed potentially advertising the discussion to medical students.

Action:

• Shuangyu Li, Riya George & Enam-ul-Haque to arrange and appropriately advertise a twitter discussion for the end of February 2017.
• Enam-ul-Haque to resend twitter guide tutorial to DIMAH members and to post podcasts and videos made from previous twitter chats on the DIMAH website.
• Faculty development & sharing of good practice: A discussion took place around the incentives for current DIMAH members have to renew their membership in the upcoming months and we re-visited the issue of offering bespoke training to medical schools. Members raised that offering bespoke training may not be practically feasible; highlighting issues around time and arranging financial expenses and the lack of consensus and clarity around what training should be offered. Angela mentioned no responses were obtained from the email sent out to the wider DIMAH contact list regarding suggestions around what training would be useful to offer to medical institutions and what other things DIMAH might offer.
• Hannah Condry suggested it would be helpful to gain training on how to deliver diversity education and issues concerning faculty development. Suggestions included utilising the CPD sessions for workshops around faculty development and using the sessions as a platform for sharing good practice and the experiences of teaching diversity amongst the different DIMAH members. This could be an attractive element in gaining more participation and membership to DIMAH, where the morning session of the DIMAH meeting could focus on the strategy and development of DIMAH and the afternoon session could be dedicated to CPD and workshops trainings.

Action:

• Next DIMAH meeting to put on the agenda discussion around CPD sessions being more resourcefully utilised to offer members workshops around faculty development and an opportunity to share good practice and teaching experiences and advertise these more widely to
  non-members as well as members.
• Explore and potentially arrange a series of CPD sessions where different DIMAH members could present the different work they are doing around diversity education and their teaching experiences.
• DIMAH members interested in presenting their work at the CPD session are to submit their ideas to Angela Rowlands and Nisha Dogra.

6. Conference updates

AMEE Helsinki 2017:

Margot Turner, Enam-ul-Haque, Rebecca Farrington and Aarti Bansal have had accepted a workshop around diversity for the AMEE conference

• Hannah Condry and fellow medical student had a research paper accepted around “understanding LGBT issues in healthcare amongst medical students.”
• Shuangyu Li and Angela Rowlands are planning on submitting a poster for the ASME conference.

ASME Researching Medical Education 2016:

• Riya George achieved finalist position and presented in the ‘Master-class’ Researching Medical Education session and achieved runner-up prize.

STEM for Britain 2017:

Riya George has been selected to present her PhD Research at the Parliamentary House of Commons in March 2017.

7. Papers, reports and disseminations

CAPE Journal:
Jon Ward, Shuangyu Li and Candan Ertubey are in the process of a reviewing literature for a paper
around inter-professional development

8. Liaison with other groups

• Nisha Dogra has become the Associate Dean for Equality and Diversity at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and also part of the GMC Diversity and Education Advisory Group.
• Adrian Barrowdale provided various updates around the work of diversity education within the GMC these included:
• Diversity and Education Advisory Group: Short-term, external reference group made up of clinicians, academics, NHS leads and various stakeholders to support guidance around promoting excellence within medical education. Adrian highlighted the emphasis equality and diversity will play on the agenda in terms of making it a relevant issue across all standards. An early working group discussion will take place in London on the 06th March 2017 and topics will include differential attainment for undergraduates and postgraduates, developing a bank of good practice examples and a focus on race and ethnicity.

Action:

• Adrian Barrowdale to send via Angela Rowlands the working draft documents two weeks prior to the 6th March 2017 for DIMAH members to review and comment on.

Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA): GMC’s plans to establish a UK wide MLA. This would create a single, objective demonstration that those who obtain registration with a licence to practice medicine in the UK can meet a common threshold for safe practice (essentially a replacement to the PLAB exam and part of the final exams for medical students). Similarly equality, diversity and promoting fairness will be part of this agenda and Adrian encouraged perspectives and representation from DIMAH to attend the consultation meeting on the 30th April 2017 and share expertise around developing diversity content which can be included in final examinations and assessments. Further information about this can be found on the web-link: is http://www.gmc-uk.org/education/29000.asp

Action:

• DIMAH members who wish to submit ideas for the consultation are encouraged to do so individually. DIMAH has been requested to send in responses as an organisation, therefore please submit your idea to Angela Rowlands who will then collate all the ideas into one
  document from DIMAH.
• Outcomes Review: The GMC are also undertaking a review of the Outcomes for medical education, and a formal consultation exercise is planned to begin once the MLA consultation has concluded. However, before that, Kate Gregory (GMC) is convening a group and will be arranging an ‘active writing workshop’ on the 28th February 2017 and suggestions concerning curriculum development and content around diversity education would be welcomed from DIMAH members.

More details are available from: email – [email protected] / tel – 02071895435. DIMAH has been asked to send a representative. Travel may be reimbursed. If you would like to attend please contact Angela Rowlands.

Engaging Equality and Diversity Leads: Adrian also mentioned the GMC is actively seeking to engage with Equality and Diversity Leads at medical schools and discussed the challenges around identifying the right representation from medical schools and who had a defined role in diversity. Engagement with Equality and Diversity Leads would hopefully enable more discussion and involvement around the importance of developing quality curriculum and sharing good practice in diversity education.

9. Project updates

• Judith Caboche from Plymouth University is planning on mapping diversity and inclusion within the curriculum in an attempt to establish good practice content.
• Shuangyu Li and Jia Liu discussed PhD Research around how international medical students develop cultural competence. Jia’s PhD will involve a mapping exercise where all learning objectives across the MBBS 5 years will be reviewed to determine where the equality and diversity agenda is situated. This will then be followed by an ethnographic research project exploring how international medical
  students develop cultural competence in both formal and informal settings.
• Hannah Condry from Bristol University is planning to develop a third sector placement for medical students to gain experience in working with diversity population groups and asked the group for advice on how other institutions have implemented this in their curriculum.

10. Website review

Suggestions for improvement: Discussion from new members around how the website can be improved were ascertained, these included amending the ‘join’ tab to ‘get involved’; and outlining the different ways individuals could get involved with the work of DIMAH. Other suggestions included asking individuals to share what they are doing in diversity education at their medical institutions and making the
website more of a platform for sharing and exchanging good practice. Shuangyu Li suggested developing a ‘generic form’ for new members to complete to determine their contact details and information about their role and suggested the need for a ‘user-central DIMAH email address’ to be created and included on the website.

Action:

• Angela Rowlands to liaise with Jon in regards to changes to the home page to include a section titled ‘get involved’ and outlining ‘ways to get involved.’
• Review in the next DIMAH meeting the ‘why get involved’ section and include more information about ‘what can you contribute’ to attract new members. This can also be linked to twitter discussions (#DIMAHcontribution) to promote membership, as suggested by Judith
• Judith Caboche agreed to review and amend the section ‘why join/ why get involved’ for the next DIMAH meeting.
• Collectively develop a ‘contact list’ of individuals working in diversity education in medical schools on the website and developing a central database for sharing teaching and good practice on the website. Jon to discuss the possibility of this for the next meeting.
• Jon to check the accessibility for the link on ‘free online training’ and whether a note needs to be made stating ‘access to module 2 and 3 can be granted by first accessing module 1”.
• Student engagement: Discussion around creating a ‘DIMAH Student body’ emphasising the value of representation from undergraduate medical students. However concerns were raised around how student representation for DIMAH would be determined and what role students would play. Potential avenues for exploring student involvement could be through Med Soc, Student Equality and Diversity Committees and Student Interest Groups. A suggestion was made that a student diversity group with various student representations from different medical students could be arranged alongside DIMAH meetings.

Action:

Student engagement in DIMAH to be addressed on the agenda at the next DIMAH meeting.

11. Any other business

• Angela Rowlands will be sending out a questionnaire from Myraid Coragan on ‘human trafficking’ and kindly encouraged DIMAH members to complete this.
• DIMAH would like to thank Jon Ward for hosting the DIMAH meeting at the University of Birmingham.
• DIMAH Meeting after ASME Conference: Discussion around the feasibility of arranging an open meeting during the ASME conference to inform individuals of the work of DIMAH and then arrange another formal meeting at a later date. The issue of involving individuals on Skype and arranging teleconference events between meetings was also discussed.

Action:

Jon Ward to liaise with ASME in regards to arranging a room after the Conference that could be utilise for the ‘open DIMAH’ meeting.

12. Next Meeting

11th May 2017 10.30am – 3.30pm at the University of Sheffield Medical School

Action:

Angela Rowlands to contact Aarti Bansal and Davidner Singh to see if they are able to arrange avenue for the next meeting and to email the DIMAH member with information regarding the location and travel.