Collaborating with peer mentors to co-create the evidence-based medicine curriculum in undergraduate medical education

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is often perceived as just statistics and critical appraisal of journal articles by medical students.  As a medical educator and the theme lead for public health and clinical research, I wanted to understand the reasons behind this perception, by looking through the eyes of medical students.   Over the last few years, I have trained students to become peer mentors and got them involved in EBM teaching; co-creating and evaluating the curriculum.  More recently, I collaborated with a team of peer mentors in Leicester Medical School (students who had intercalated to do an MSc in research) to organise a research conference for our students.  Students were guided by peer mentors to draft abstracts, develop posters and oral presentations. 

I invited some faculty members who were champions for research to be guest speakers, to help with shortlisting the abstracts and to be on the judging panel for oral and poster presentations.  The students-led research society in the university funded prizes for oral presentations and the top three poster presentations.  The conference was well organised and the peer mentors drafted a brochure for the conference with an agenda, bios for speakers and a summary of workshops.  Students who were already involved in research shared their experiences and provided tips for students.

We organised some parallel workshops on the day on topics such as academic foundation programmes, conducting a systematic review, qualitative research, getting involved in research, presenting at conferences and future academic careers, all of which were relevant for students at this stage of medical training.  We invited some faculty members, junior doctors and students with a research background to deliver the workshops.  Feedback from students was quite positive-‘Hearing talks and presentations from other students has inspired me to want to get involved in research at medical school’

EBM is being designed as a spiral longitudinal theme in the medical school and we are co-creating this in collaboration with our trained peer mentors. We will continue our systematic enquiry into the issue and create communities of practice with students, peer mentors and faculty who are EBM champions.  Future EBM sessions could guide our students to conduct well-designed research while in clinical placements.  Peer mentoring is mutually beneficial because it develops the mentor as a good communicator, a teacher and a leader.  I now appreciate that learning and development are the result of mediation and offer scaffolded learning for medical students.