Welcome to our new BeSST BLOG!
Over the years we have had numerous inspiring and thought provoking conversations at our BeSST (Behavioural and Social Science Teaching in Medicine) meetings and often, when it is my turn, I write up notes and send them to everyone. However it has struck me that perhaps we might try and capture our collective musings in a more systematic way. As part of my contribution to our new BeSST Blog My idea is, with permission, to write up some of our notes and make them public. This may then help serve as a repository for our ideas. Or perhaps it will contain sparks of thought that will in time, lead to more fully formed projects relating to our practice as teachers (or friends of teachers) who deliver sociology and / or psychology to undergraduate medics in the UK.
Last year at the AMEE conference in Vienna we organised a BeSST symposium in which Frederick Hafferty (prolific writer on the hidden curriculum in medicine) spoke about the social and behavioural sciences in the United States. His talk reminded me that our contemporary work leads on from the work of others that has taken place over 70 years. We are, I think, standing on the shoulders of giants and it is good to know. For more on the social and behavioural sciences in medicine in the past see our BeSST publication on the history of sociology teaching in the UK. Or for a current overview here is a link to our AMEE guide to teaching sociology in medical education.
I will start my posts with recording, in brief, the notes from our BeSST Tea Time Specials: these are monthly meetings with practitioners from the UK and beyond who are interested in sharing thoughts, tips, conundrums and solutions. Watch this space!
Tracey Collett (Co chair of BeSST, Associate Lecturer in the Sociology of Health and Illness at Peninsula Medical School, Plymouth, UK)