This month I’m really pleased to be able to share with the FACE readership some news of a national educational scholarship project we have been working on looking at developing Active Bystander training.
You may have heard of Active Bystander activity, or you may only know the phrase but not what it means, so I will start by sharing the information we give our students:
An Active Bystander is someone who understands how and when to use the power of dialogue to inspire change around the community. It is someone who reinforces powerful messages about poor behaviour, even if no one else seems to be doing so. Active Bystanders go the extra mile; in understanding what problematic attitudes look like, they learn and develop practical skills for safely intervening when they witness such attitudes.
As you will understand, empowering students to become Active Bystanders in their personal and professional lives is an important part of their training and development in medical school. We already provide an introductory session on this to all students who enter in their first year of their programme. The GMC also expects all students to have access to relevant training to support the development of Active Bystander skills throughout their programmes of study, and so in partnership with colleagues from the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde, we bid for, and were awarded, the Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) Board Award, to explore the feasibility of developing scalable Active Bystander Training.
The work had involved the team from Glasgow developing a number of different training components, and delivering them first to students at Glasgow medical school. After receiving ethical approval for the work from the University of Liverpool, the team then worked with Prof Taz Goddard-Fuller from Liverpool to discuss which of these components might work for students training here. In November, the Glasgow team came down to deliver this session to volunteer students in year 4 of the programme, who were asked to rate their confidence in understanding and using active bystander skills both pre and post the session.
Initial results from the project look very promising indeed, with Liverpool students recording more of a boost in confidence regarding bystander skills than the original Glasgow pilot. The next stage of the project involves incorporating some of the session elements into a new Active Bystander training session that will be rolled out in year 5 in the next couple of months as part of the Leadership Day. We will repeat the data collection exercise to understand whether the components selected will work in different year groups, and have at least 2 other medical schools now looking to trial the session we have developed. We have been invited to present the results of the work at the next Annual ASME Conference which will take place in Edinburgh in July.
If you have any interest in getting involved in the Active Bystander sessions or in developing such training in your own context, please feel free to contact Prof Taz Goddard-Fuller (Taz.Goddard-Fuller@liverpool.ac.uk)