School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Biology Medicine and Health, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester United Kingdom.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Jun 27;15(6):e1006746. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006746. eCollection 2019 Jun.
We have now reached the genomics era within medicine; genomics is being used to personalise treatment, make diagnoses, prognoses, and predict adverse outcomes resulting from treatment with certain drugs. Genomic data is now abundant in healthcare, and the newly created profession of clinical bioinformaticians are responsible for its analysis. In the United Kingdom, clinical bioinformaticians are trained within a 3-year programme, integrating a work-based placement with a part-time Master's degree. As this profession is still developing, trainees can feel isolated from their peers whom are located in other hospitals and can find it difficult to gain the mentorship that they require to complete their training. Building strong networks or communities of practice (CoPs) and allowing sharing of knowledge and experiences is one solution to addressing this isolation. Within the Master's delivered at the University of Manchester, we have integrated group-centred problem-based learning (PBL) using real clinical case studies worked on during each course unit. This approach is combined with a flipped style of teaching providing access to online content in our Virtual Learning Environment before the course. The face-to-face teaching is used to focus on the application of the students' knowledge to clinical case studies. In this study, we conducted semistructured interviews with 8 students, spanning 3 cohorts of students. We evaluated the effectiveness of this style of teaching and whether it had contributed to the formation of CoPs between our students. Our findings demonstrated that this style of teaching was preferred by our students to a more traditional lecture-based format and that the problem-based learning approach enabled the formation of CoPs within these cohorts. These CoPs are valuable in the development of this new profession and assist with the production of new guidelines and policies that are helping to professionalise this new group of healthcare scientists.
我们现在已经进入了医学的基因组学时代；基因组学正在被用于个性化治疗、做出诊断、预测预后，并预测某些药物治疗的不良后果。基因组数据现在在医疗保健中非常丰富，新创建的临床生物信息学家职业负责对其进行分析。在英国，临床生物信息学家通过为期 3 年的培训计划进行培训，该计划将在职培训与兼职硕士学位相结合。由于这个职业仍在发展中，受训者可能会感到与其他医院的同行隔离，并且很难获得完成培训所需的指导。建立强大的网络或实践社区（CoP）并允许共享知识和经验是解决这种隔离的一种方法。在曼彻斯特大学开设的硕士课程中，我们使用基于真实临床案例研究的小组为中心的基于问题的学习（PBL）进行了整合，这些案例研究在每个课程单元中进行。这种方法与翻转式教学相结合，在课程之前提供我们虚拟学习环境中的在线内容访问。面对面教学用于将学生的知识应用于临床案例研究。在这项研究中，我们对 8 名学生进行了半结构化访谈，涵盖了 3 个学生群体。我们评估了这种教学方式的有效性，以及它是否促成了我们学生之间的 CoP 的形成。我们的研究结果表明，这种教学方式比传统的基于讲座的教学方式更受学生欢迎，基于问题的学习方法能够在这些群体中形成 CoP。这些 CoP 在这个新职业的发展中非常有价值，并有助于制定新的准则和政策，帮助这一新的医疗保健科学家群体专业化。
