As the weather turned and the nights started getting longer the fellowship continued to heat up. Following on from some amazing and engaging networking events November was no different. Jess led an informative and passionate meeting around the student council led by FNF. Seeing all the hard work put in to engage students with Universities and HEE was fascinating. For those of us focussing our projects on students, Jess helped us re-kindle the reason “why”.

Our ongoing academic support sessions also included a quality improvement session. QI comes in many shapes and sizes and through smaller fun break-out sessions we reviewed the usefulness of PDSA cycles. As a CEIF group, we have a mixture of experience with varying QI models which was great to share and explore.

Sharing our varied experiences, wealth of knowledge and backgrounds was extremely useful when we embarked on our next clinical supervision journey with Chris, Paula, and Maria. Our day started with our prepared pitches, a slightly stressful but important endeavour. It was uplifting to see how passionate and knowledgeable the other fellows were and how those 10 people in the room would change the face of health education for the better. As the quote at the start explains “nothing is impossible”.

Being inspired by the other fellows, Chris, Paula and Maria was a continuing theme of November. “Project Feed Forward” was demonstrated by our supervisors who identified how being honest, reflective and exploring other ideas can completely re-frame a challenge. I was lucky enough to have my challenge laid bare before the group and have engaging and thought-provoking feedback. My CEIFs came to my aid and reshaped how I looked at the problem. This left me emboldened to continue and re-address my challenges. Having seen how successful this was a few of the fellows completed another feed-forward session virtually to aid another with a similar challenge. After this session, someone asked me why I found them so helpful. My honest answer was the level of engagement and support from the other fellows was astounding and it felt like everyone wanted you to achieve everything you could. In only the second month I feel like we have an amazing group of fellows that will help each other every step of the way.

It has been invaluable to have this support network as working from home, isolated can come with challenges both to motivation and productivity. This has been especially tough as many fellows had previously worked in teams in a structured clinical environment. Alongside the fellows, our academic supervisors Chris, Paula and Maria have been expertly guiding and supporting our journey, with humour, unmatched knowledge of a variety of areas and experience. It really does feel that “Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I’m possible”. I’m excited to see what the other fellows and I can do over the coming months.

Charlie Colby – Clinical Education Improvement Fellow

If you would like to find out more about the CEIF Cohort of 2022-23, click here.