School of Medicine

The Institute aims to lead on research based teaching within its research programmes, and ensures that students undertaking research projects at any level are linked to strong researchers and major projects to enhance the learning experience and contribute to the development of the future research workforce. The Institute also utilises its role in taught courses at all levels to enhance the knowledge, skills and experience of our students to be intelligent research-users in their future careers.

Each of the research programmes have a rolling programme of PhD students and also provide projects for the Masters in Public Health.

The Institute holds monthly Teaching Group Sessions at the Institute Academic Meeting for all staff who have a strong interest in teaching. In addition, there is an Education Management Group which meets monthly to take an overview of all the Institute's educational activities, working to ensure these are of the highest quality.

Current PhD Students

Research capacity building is one of our highest priorities. We have continued to increase the number of PhD students by using internally and locally generated funding to MRC allocations to the School of Medicine. This has increased the number of students from a total of 14 PhD students between 2002/2007 to 27 students currently registered within the Institute (5 in 2008/09, 4 in 2009/10, 11 in 2010/11, 8 in 2011/12 and 3 in 2012/13).

Masters in Public Health students

The Masters of Public Health has been run successfully in Cardiff since 1989 and has a national and international reputation. The programme is the product of a multi-disciplinary collaboration between the School of Medicine, Cardiff University, the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, Public Health Wales, University of Glamorgan and other academic partners. The course attracts approximately 30 students per academic year, approximately half of who are international students.

MSc in Ageing Health and Disease

The one year full time MSc in Ageing, Health and Disease offers an opportunity for health and social care professionals to explore the complex health and social needs of older people living in today’s society. The course offers opportunities to develop broad based knowledge and skills by offering high quality, integrated, multidisciplinary education in the field of ageing, health and disease. The course attracts approximately 15 students per academic year with approximately 3 international students registered.

The Clinical Epidemiology Route of Intercalated Degree Programme

The Route has been developed from the former Public Health Route to include a wide range of disciplines, perspectives and learning modules. Now in its second year, with 15 full-time students, the Route aims to provide an exciting and enjoyable course for students who wish to study issues relating to public health, primary care and health services research in depth, from a new perspective and with the freedom to think.

The two core modules are both in Research Methods, addressing qualitative and quantitative methods, systematic reviews, policy context, protocol formulation, analysis, reporting and presentation. Students also select 5 optional modules from a range of topics: Health Improvement, Health Protection, Quality Improvement, International Health (2 modules), Long term medical conditions, Infections, Learning Disability, Preventive Cardiology and Health Economics. These taught modules are complemented by a supervised Research Project for one third of the course credits.

Undergraduate Teaching

We contribute to the delivery of teaching in four of the five years of the curricular, with lead responsibility for community based teaching from over 180 general practices around Wales, communication skills teaching for the entire curriculum and medicine in the community. Teaching delivered by the Institute receives consistently high feedback from students and elements of the delivery have been identified as areas of excellence in successive GMC visits.

The new curriculum, C21: Developing Tomorrow's Doctors, recognises the need for students to have a strong science training and good understanding of the impact of communities on individual health in order to achieve its main aim of producing ‘great doctors who understand people and the environment in which we all live and work’. This means the Institute can be an exemplar or research led teaching as the research programmes are of direct clinical relevance to doctors in training. Institute staff work closely with the Institute of Medical Education and also provide teaching leadership to the wide community of General Practice teachers in Wales, ensuring innovation and continuing improvement in delivery.

We have developed a successful route for intercalated BSc in Clinical Epidemiology, with increasing numbers of student’s year on year electing this option.

The focus to contribute to the new curriculum will be based on four domains:

• Population Health
• General Practice
• Communication
• Research Methods/Evidence Based Medicine/Critical Appraisal

Short Course/CPD delivery

The Institute is developing a series of short courses to be made available across the School, University and more broadly. These will be based on a cost recovery mechanism and will be used as a vehicle to share research expertise across traditional boundaries.

Academic Support of Public Health Training

The Institute supports the development of the Public Health Training Scheme in Wales. Our remit is the continued development and delivery of an All Wales Masters in Public Health and the tutorial system for Part A examination that fits with the requirements of the UK Faculty of Public Health . We provide academic support for Public Health Specialists at all levels (including non-medical professionals) including administration of the Public Health Speciality Training Programme, providing training bases for academic attachments for training public health specialists An annual Public Health Training conference in Wales is organised.