Throughout my medical career I have strived to support others in achieving their full potential. I believe that everyone should have access to good education, supportive mentors and affordable resources. No student or doctor should be disadvantaged in their education due to financial limitations, especially those from widening participation backgrounds who often have no access to mentors and are unable to attend expensive courses. Barriers that I have faced in both education and medicine have generated a drive to help others that has shaped my working life. Now, as a Urology Registrar, I dedicate most of my free time to helping students and trainees by teaching, training and mentoring their personal development.
This experience culminated in the development of several free OSCE and surgical revision courses for medical students and junior doctors during my Foundation and Core Surgical training years. In more recent years I have created nationally run, free Urology courses for medical students and junior doctors, including the ‘Learn Urology in a day’ course and the ‘Urology for Medical Students Boot Camp’. I have had the opportunity to publish and present at international meetings on how others can create similar training courses to provide standardised medical education and remove financial barriers to learning.
To address the need for standardised training in Urology and a lack of affordable and accessible resources for trainees across the world I wrote the peer-reviewed textbook “Urology for Medical Students and Junior Doctors” (ISBN: 979-8-6432-6326-5). I also created a textbook to guide others in the creation of accessible educational resources, entitled “Putting People before Profits” (ISBN: 979-8-5875-9675-7). These are available free for resource-limited trainees and all profits from sales elsewhere are donated to charities funding medical education and medical education research.
I am currently undertaking a PhD in medical education and have been awarded the Intercollegiate Committee for Basic Surgical Examinations Research Fellowship. My research aims to characterise differential attainment in surgical examinations in order to enable equity and fairness in training and career progression. To date, this work has resulted in 14 research papers, 24 conference presentations and 6 international prizes.
One of my greatest joys at work is in training and empowering others to develop themselves as clinicians, trainers and leaders. As I move forwards in my career, I will continue working to improve access to quality medical training and I look forward to mentoring the next generation of doctors. After all, medical education is more than just teaching and training, it is also inspiring a passion for change, improvement and progression so that we can help each other to help others.
