Alex Crichton

Since the early days of medical school, I have always taken a keen interest in medical education. Outside of my day-to-day clinical activities, providing educational opportunities for my junior colleagues has always been a passion of mine. After securing my vascular training post in the West Midlands in 2020, I became a digital teaching fellow for the regional core surgical training programme. This role allowed me to organise a regional education programme, and work with senior clinicians to provide a comprehensive variety of educational activities, with digital technology at the heart of its delivery.

I quickly realised during the digital fellow role that I wanted to take on a more significant position within Health Education England West Midlands, and work towards taking a leading role in the strategy and development of digital innovation for trainees across a wide array of specialties. In 2021 I was successful in my application for the role of a HEE West Midlands Clinical Fellow as an out of programme trainee. This provided me with the time and resources to project manage several of the digital advances within the region. Much of my focus has been on spreading good practice in digital education through the PGVLE. During my fellowship, I have proudly spread the good practice of the PGVLE across multiple specialties, and developed those specialties that already use the PGVLE to further heights. In this fellowship, I published several pieces of work, and presented our outcomes from the PGVLE on local, regional and national scales.

Having had a successful year out of programme, I was delighted to return to training as a specialty trainee with a 60% clinical: 40% HEE West Midlands fellow timetable for the 2022 academic year. This has allowed me to continue my work not just within the West Midlands, but to collaborate with other regions in the UK. Ultimately my aim is to create a platform that provides clinicians with the ability to collaboratively work towards improving digital training opportunities for clinicians across specialties and regions in the UK.