Closing Editorial: Conversations in healthcare education

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The theme coincided with the 8 ^thInternational Clinical Skills Conference held in Prato Italy, May 2019. The conference focused on putting the spotlight on conversations in healthcare and we were highly successful in achieving this aim by generating much discussion, debate and dialogue amongst our conference delegates. The conference is known for its informality, friendliness and ability to bring people together as a community of practice and this year was no exception. The conversations on twitter alone was unprecedented with over three million impressions over the period of the conference. This is a truly remarkable number given that the conference is limited to only 250 delegates because of the size of the venue. Whilst the conference did not generate as many paper submissions to MedEdPublish as we would have liked, the five papers submitted were noteworthy and included practical tips to use for teaching intrinsic skills to physicians ( LaFleur et al., 2019), implementing a collaborative social media platform in obstetrics and gynaecology ( O'sullivan, Janssens and Warhurst, 2019), and developing consultation skills for medical students ( Andersson et al., 2019). Nevertheless, we believe this is the first experiment in true 360-degree scientific peer review. A system where manuscripts published on the journal's website before a conference can be explained in conference presentations, questions asked, discussed on social media and finally reviews published alongside the paper on the website. Such a model must surely be beneficial for disseminating new research and ensuring it is of the highest standard. Conversations in healthcare today continue to be of great importance to the future of clinical education and for developing health professionals with the skills needed for person-centred care and we look forward to continuing this work into the future.

Keywords: Clinical Conversations; Clinical Skills; Collaboration; Communication; Debriefing; Feedback; Teamwork.