At Miad we have a team of trainers with an amazing breadth of knowledge and experience who facilitate our webinars. We’re introducing our “Meet the Trainer” series where we sit down with our trainers and have a chat about who they are and what they do, and to kick off we spoke with Dr. Jo Byfleet. Jo is a practising GP but delivers our training for appraisal, appraisal refresher, clinical and educational supervision, trainees in difficulty, conflict resolution, working in the UK, and remote supervision.

You can also watch a short clip from our talk with Jo below:

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Could you tell us a bit about how you got into Medical Education?

I’ve been a GP since 2008 but I’ve always had an interest in education. Even at that point, I was quite involved in delivering educational sessions. Not long after I qualified, I became a programme director for GP training. That involved a lot of different things like oversight of an organisation or doctors moving through the GP training scheme, but also the delivery of a day release programme. I then helped to establish the site where I worked to be a training practice.

I deliver our level 3 safeguarding training and so I’ve done quite a lot on rolling out big programmes, and I guess that was where I got my med expertise and webinar expertise.

I was doing that face to face and that was the first thing I needed to convert into a webinar format. It needed to be interactive so that people could understand the objectives of the training. Particularly when you’re trying to increase people’s skills and not just impart knowledge. That was a great thing to do and added to my experience in coming along to Miad.  

When you transitioned to online learning, what do you think has worked best so far?

It’s been a fascinating learning curve. I guess safeguarding would be a good case to take because there’s always been this argument that it has to be face to face for the objectives to be achieved. A lot of places went online, but you are only asked to independently go through a training package. I think that has a place and contributes to all of our learning, but when we’re looking at behaviours and attitudes and skills, you maybe have to have difficult conversations and be able to experiment. That’s how we learn.

I think my personal experience would be that the group size is quite important for interaction online. I think it’s similar to face-to-face, but if it gets too big, those things become difficult. 6-10 people is a great size for a session. Each individual gets a lot out of it. Breakout groups are also very important, not just for giving people an opportunity to get more involved, but also when you’re sitting at a screen for a long time, changes in posture and mood can give you a sense of what you’re doing.

What are some key learnings that you hope people come away from your sessions having learnt?

The course I guess that I enjoy the most is the new appraisal course or the appraiser refresher course. I think there are different roles that we do as doctors, whether that’s supervising trainees, whether you’re appraising, or whether you’re a part of a managerial structure etc. I think one of the really key things for doctors to take away from that course is the remit of appraising. It’s very easy to go out of scope or to start to wear the other hats that you have. That for me is a key outcome of that course, for people to understand exactly what is in scope for an appraiser.

But also the things that might arise that fall out of scope and how to deal with that and focus on the job at hand. The course also looks at how you might have conversations when difficult things arise. Having a clear understanding of how to approach that conversation.

Also, ask yourself what information do you need to gather what you need to know? How might you formulate your judgement so that you can make the right decision? I think a key thing to take away is what we learned from each other.

You can connect with Jo on Linkedin here, and keep an eye out for our next Meet The Trainer instalment!

Head to https://miadhealthcare.com/webinars to have a look at all the webinars we offer.