The Contradictions of Medical Education: A Political View from Practice

This book presents a political view of medical education based on dialectical analysis of a range of practice. This approach, and the contradictions that it reveals, will enable anyone with an interest in medical education development, or in teaching or researching medical education, to do so systematically, critically and constructively for their own context. How the analysis of medical education was built is described. It also offers relevant academic commentary on the practice that forms that basis of the political view. The issues addressed include assessment, curriculum, teaching methods, social issues, identity, professional values, management, undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing medical education, and the process of becoming an educationalist. These are widely discussed topics in medical education, not yet unified on the basis of a critical theoretical framework. Education is a social science so the book is guided to understand the links between natural science theories that underpin medicine, to the social science theory that underpins medical education.

This book is ground-breaking, in being the first and only political analysis developed specifically for medical education, and based on the practice of that discipline in a variety of contexts in the global north and the global south. The academic commentaries clarify the relationship between the political analysis of medical education and the existing content of the discipline that is widely taught and used. This view of medical education will enable those working, teaching, studying or researching in this field to analyse, criticise, understand, challenge, and build on current knowledge and practice appropriately to their own context.

Janet Grant BA(Hons), MSc, PhD, FBPsS is a chartered educational psychologist who was the first non-clinical lecturer in medical education in the world, appointed at King’s College Hospital Medical School in London in 1972. Her PhD in 1980 was on medical students’ and doctors’ diagnostic thinking processes. Janet is Emerita Professor of Education in Medicine at the UK Open University.

For most of her academic life, Janet conducted policy research in medical education for the UK government and professional medical and regulatory bodies. Her interests are in policy research, regulation, educational development, continuing professional development and curriculum. She has worked in many countries and with international organisations around the world, and has written extensively on contextual relevance in these topics.

Janet has been a regulator in both postgraduate medical education and legal education.

Leonard Grant, MChem(Oxon), MSc, PhD is an early career academic interested in the political economy of work as a determinant of health. Leonard’s PhD thesis used a dialectical materialist methodology to consider the workplace as part of the postgraduate General Practice curriculum. From 2013 to 2024, Leonard was the Academic Course Manager for the FAIMER/Keele MHPE in Assessment and Accreditation where he managed the educational process for hundreds of students, taught Research Methods and wrote on distance and distributed learning. Leonard has been involved in developing and teaching a new Public Health MSc at the University of Winchester, UK. He is currently a Lecturer in Medical Education at the University of Liverpool.