Palliative Care, led by Dr Stephen Barclay, has yielded various publications, including some derived from the reflective essays that final year students produce as a course assignment. For example, former PhD student Erica Borgstrom published two papers using the reflective essays as her starting point:  ‘Medical Professionalism: Conflicting Values for Tomorrow’s Doctors’ and ‘Constructing denial as a disease object: accounts by medical students meeting dying patients’.

An ongoing research study by Dr Barclay and Dr Thomas Weetman, Academic Clinical Fellow in Medical Education and Palliative Medicine, focuses on how final year students recognise, react to, and describe medical uncertainty in relation to people approaching the end of their lives. This study too is based on current final year clinical students’ GP Palliative Care reflective essays. Data analysis and publication are expected next year and results will be published here as they are sure to benefit and be of interest to our 2021 graduates.

Another recent publication from Dr Barclay’s group, ‘Hospice care access inequalities: a systematic review and narrative synthesis,’ looked at the demographics of who accesses end of life care more often and concluded that equity of access remains a major challenge to the hospice movement.