Becoming a member of AMEE gives you access to a diverse global network and opens up the opportunity to connect, collaborate and innovate with fellow health professions practitioners, educators, trainers, volunteers, academics, students, researchers and organisations dedicated to improving global healthcare education. Each month we choose a member to highlight their academic and professional career and take a look at how they are making the best of their membership in AMEE. 
 
Megan Anakin is a Senior Lecturer and Education Advisor at the University of Otago. She recently presented a paper online as part of the Hybrid AMEE 2022 conference, titled “Student and educator experiences of an integrated medical imaging curriculum.” 

Congratulations on presenting your paper at AMEE 2022. What response did you get from participants and why was it important to you to be involved? 

My favourite comment was sent to me via the chat in Swapcard from another online participant who wrote that my presentation: “was the most informative, interesting and engaging short session so far” because I tried to tell an engaging story rather than recount too many details about my study. I directed the audience to read the article if they wanted more details. Primarily, I wanted to engage the participants in my session with the findings of my study. I think I succeeded because a comment from another participant posted in the chat was “I feel resonated with your findings. There seems a gap between learning and instruction of medical imaging. The gap also happens in the clinical practice, like who (the physician or the radiologist) should take the responsibility if the medical imaging was interpreted wrongly. If we have time before the end of the session, I would like to know if you see similar themes emerging from your data.”
 

Tell me a little bit about the research of your paper and presentation. What really excites you about this topic? 

As an education researcher, I feel very privileged to be invited into the world of my clinical colleagues and explore facets of their practice as clinicians and educators that they have not explored before. In this case, the research I presented represents the first part of a larger study of the medical imaging curriculum at the Otago Medical School. Often we jump to solutions before we have thoroughly understood the problem we want to solve. The findings about the dual use of medical imaging in the medical programme can help us to carefully consider how we can design and present learning resources and assessment activities to students and teachers.
 

Can you tell us more about the project and the colleagues you worked with?

This project was a student-staff collaboration achieved at University of Otago, Dunedin and Christchurch, New Zealand. At the time of data collection, Ray Ma had completed his 4th year of study in our combined bachelor of medicine and surgery programme. He brought his understanding of the early years of our medical programme and the perspective of a student ready to start his second year in clinical learning environments in Dunedin to inform how he performed an audit of learning resources and the interviews of students and staff. Alex McHaffie and Rathan Subramaniam, brought a wealth of experience and insights as a consultant radiologists and teachers of medical students across the medical programme at the Otago Medical School at two campuses. This study built upon work done by Rathan over 10 years ago to investigate radiology education at the specialist training level in Australasia. A gap in his work was to examine how medical imaging is taught and learned in the undergraduate/pre-registration settings. Hopefully, this brief description provides a glimpse of the reflexiveness that our team has woven into this study to incorporate different perspectives, experiences, and expertise into our research.
 

As a member of AMEE and a Faculty Development Committee member, what benefits does the association offer that help you as an educator?

AMEE is a warm and welcoming community of people who come from a wide variety of healthcare and non-healthcare backgrounds who are deeply passionate about health professions education scholarship and research. Shortly after joining AMEE, I became involved as a reviewer for MedEdPublish and applied for Associate Fellowship. Reviewing for MedEdPublish enabled me to hone my writing and reviewing skills. In becoming an Associate Fellow, I made the commitment to be more involved with AMEE so I have been reviewing conference abstracts and joined the Faculty Development Committee to represent my region. Again, my participating in these roles has enabled me to grow in areas I could not have anticipated.
  

Anything else that you would like to add?

I encourage others to jump in and get involved with AMEE because there are so many ways we can be connect and contribute.

To view the full article by Dr Anakin visit the Academic Radiology website.