Clinical academics need superfans

A post by Katrina Bannigan. A superfan is the enthusiastic fan who queues for tickets days in advance, follows the object of their passion tirelessly and continues their support through good times and bad. Superfans are quite extreme because of their level of dedication. You may find it strange that I am suggesting super fandom as an approach to facilitating change within a professional context but I genuinely believe it is going to take the dedication of the superfan to pave the way to the clinical academic role becoming an accepted and established career pathway within the Allied Health Professions (AHPs).  

Only good for a cool box?

Are you a clinical academic feeling you’ve not quite managed to make the clinical academic equation work? Feeling a bit sad, guilty, inadequate? For sure it must be you not getting, since so many others seem to have cracked it?

Cabinet responsibility

What can I say? By that I mean some combination of, what is meaningful for me to say? What is interesting to say? — And, importantly, what am I allowed to say?

New Year, New Tricks…

For a range of reasons there were no posts on this blog in 2020. The main reason was that I’d felt less and less comfortable writing about anything a clinician academic. Because, I no longer felt like one. Not since 09/2019.

NHS managers and clinical academics: a match made in…?

In the past 15 years, I’ve worked with a range of NHS managers at different levels across a number of organisations. I’ve also mentored a sizable pool of further clinician academics working with their managers. Reflecting back, what realisations would I like to share with both NHS managers and clinical academics?

Joint clinical academic roles: sharing learning

Do you feel a “a serious lack of organisational and professional value” placed on NMAHP clinical academic skills, knowledge and, ultimately, roles that you try to advance?

Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

From as soon as one goes anywhere near the clinical academic step ladder one is told that funders look for leaders, and that one needs to start to become one. From there on it becomes a case of developing one’s leadership skills, competencies and roles. Yet, ironically, I never expected to arrive to the point of actually being one.

Fools who thieve ideas

Maybe I’m naive but until fairly recently I thought that only bad people plagiarise. I mean, why would anyone do it? And who would be fool enough to think they can get away with it?

“PhD? Nice! (But what is it?)”

I feel we’ve sold PhD as an idea to AHPs. I also feel the next challenge is for AHPs en masse to figure out what a PhD is, and what to do with people who have them. 

I feel that seeking to do a PhD is now largely viewed positively among AHPs, and there is a genuine acceptance that having a PhD is (somehow) a positive thing. I still do hear some occasional mocking, and some unwelcome comments, e.g. about people with PhDs having a different brain size than the rest of the humans, but in my experience people making these comments are now a minority and are seen as making a fool of themselves more than representing a condoned majority view.

What seems to have changed much less is how AHPs understand what a PhD is (what does it make the person competent for), and how we can make use of people with PhDs to advance our practice, knowledge and impact. 

Over the next 12 months I’d like to take further steps to change this. To move more towards a point where people actually understand what PhDs are good for (and what they are not). To this end, I will run some dedicated posts to explore the question of “What do people with PhDs do once they finish their PhD – and what more could they do given a chance?”.

I am particularly hoping to publish posts by people who are at least 4-5 years beyond completing a PhD (but pre-Professors). That is because I want to focus on the experiences of people who are in full swing of hard core crafting of contributions to AHP practice, science and future (and skip the early post-PhD haze phase….).

If this is you, and you’d be willing to write a post – please do email/tweet me and let’s make a plan for your contribution!

Happy, and very exciting, 2017 to everyone! ☺

Resign on a stinky leadership?

I find following a good leader very exciting and highly empowering. In fact, given a choice, I much more enjoy following a good, inspirational leader than lead myself. But I also find good leadership scarce.