TCT editorial: The Clinical Teacher in adolescence

Abstract

Twenty years of The Clinical Teacher (TCT): a cause for celebration and a time to reminisce. When the first issue of TCT was published in 2004, I was a recent arrival in Australia having left the United Kingdom for an academic post in the north of Queensland. Life was certainly different in the tropics. The new journal was also different to other contemporary scholarly publications in its use of colour and pictures and shorter, more practical articles. The first editorial from John Bligh introduced the ‘magazine’ as ‘focusing on medical education, especially written for teaching clinicians’.¹

I have written many times about the importance of context to frame one's teaching and health professional practice for learners and readers. Australia has many similarities to my country of birth, but it took time to understand and work within a non-identical health service and funding model. New arrivals need to be humble, receptive to advice and flexible to meet the needs of the populations they serve. This applies to educators, health professionals and, yes, journals and their editors.

In 2014, I became co editor-in-chief. In my first editorial, I suggested that TCT was now entering its adolescence. In human terms, adolescence is a period of rapid growth and development leading to maturity. A new editor also brings change, and over the next 2 years, we introduced new article types while emphasising our focus was not now solely medical education but also clinical education for all health professions. We particularly welcomed articles on interprofessional education (IPE), a longstanding passion of mine. There was a move to include more diverse voices, amongst the team of associate editors, and published writers, and on the newly formed editorial advisory group. In addition, we provided more advice about the requirements for ethical approval in relation to health professional education research and evaluation² and more explanatory text during the submission process.

While certain topics in education are always trending, such as those I mentioned in my first editorial in 2014 (widening participation/equitable access to health professional education; professionalism; assessment of competence), others are mentioned less frequently (e.g., the flipped classroom that became endemic or flopped depending on your point of view^{3, 4}) or debunked (e.g., learning styles⁵). Newer subjects included podcasts, sustainability, climate change and the use (and abuse) of social media in education.

The first of our Clinical Teacher's Toolbox by the world-renowned educator David Boud still resonates today with its perennial topic of feedback.⁶ This paper remains one of the most cited pieces in TCT. The second Toolbox gives advice and strategies for including patients (consumers) as educators,⁷ complementing the second ‘Where's the patient voice in health professional education?’ conference I attended held in Vancouver later that year. In 2015 and 2016, we published toolboxes on educational research and evaluation: one on quantitative⁸ and one on qualitative⁹ approaches. These were followed by a series of ‘How to … articles’ delving into aspects of qualitative research including writing research questions, interviewing and data synthesis.¹⁰

The download figures for articles on research and evaluation methodologies indicate that TCT readers are interested in doing, as well as reading about, scholarship. TCT occupies a space in the landscape of health professional education journals dedicated to new writers and researchers reporting on smaller scale projects and innovation. Papers are expected and accepted to be of interest to clinical educators. TCT's unique selling point (USP) continues to be its accessibility to novices and those busy clinicians juggling a heavy health service commitment with a passion for education.

Looking back at the editorials I wrote during my tenure reminds me of what was happening not only in the world of clinical education but also in my own life. It is a great privilege to be able to publish one's work regularly on a variety of topics that have a personal meaning as well as, hopefully, appealing to readers. Three editorials from 2018 stand out for me. Each one is, I feel, highly relevant today. First, as noted above, I looked at the importance of context.¹¹ Authors can forget that there are differences globally in how health professionals are trained and how health services are run, accessed and funded. It is fine to write about one's own jurisdiction, but the system needs to be elucidated for readers from other countries so that they can see the relevance of the work for their local context. We can be so parochial. Second, I wrote about learning and teaching in relation to gender and sexuality¹² as we started to receive submissions on these topics. This was and continues to be a sensitive and polarising topic for students, educators, health professionals, patients and the public. Third, I critiqued the discourse on resilience as an individual attribute rather than considering how an institutional culture affects well-being.¹³

Two of these topics became the focus of our first special issues: August 2019 on health professionals' and students' well-being; and October 2021 on inclusion, diversity and equity. For the latter, I came back from editorial retirement to be a special co-editor with Suzanne Pitama (University of Otago, New Zealand).

Then, of course, there was the pandemic.

In 2020 during Covid-19 lockdowns, the number of submissions to TCT doubled, a similar occurrence for other health professional education journals. Presumably, academics had more time on their hands to retrieve those ‘bottom drawer’ manuscripts, started but not finished, and re-consider their potential worth. Given the time from submission to early view publication, it was not until the June 2020 issue that the first reflections on the impact of Covid began to appear. Associate editors and I wrote individual perspectives on how we and our communities were facing pandemic challenges: from the use of diverse digital platforms to the importance of teamwork and collaboration for both education and health services delivery.¹⁴ The August 2020 issue had Covid-19 Insights articles¹⁵ on topics such as e-learning, online assessment, disruptions to clinical education and the expansion of telemedicine.

So onwards TCT, I wish you all the best for the next 20 years with new editors and new challenges to meet and report on such as the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on writing and publishing, cybersecurity, health professional burnout and retention issues and environmental health amongst others.

Jill Thistlethwaite: Conceptualization; writing—review and editing; writing—original draft.

The author has no conflict of interest to disclose.

The author has no ethical statement to declare.