Researcher Highlights
Leading and teaching the way to a healthier future for all

Professor and founding Director of the Academy for Collaborative Health Interprofessional Education and Vibrant Excellence (ACHIEVE), Bunmi Malau-Aduli, is using education to ensure the best possible healthcare outcomes for patients.

Imagine a world where doctors are trained in the most advanced and effective ways possible, ensuring the best possible healthcare outcomes for patients. This is the future reality Bunmi is hoping to enable through her work.

With over 25 years in research and teaching, her focus is on figuring out how to teach and evaluate these future doctors, particularly medical students and health professionals, so they’re truly prepared to handle the industry's complex challenges.

Just as a coach helps athletes perform their best, she’s focused on finding the best methods to train and evaluate medical professionals so they can, in turn, become great educators.

“Although all health professionals can function as information givers, they’re also expected to teach. However, many health professionals lack formal preparation in the principles of teaching and learning. They, therefore, need to gain skills to facilitate the learning process and carry out their educator role with efficiency and impact,” Bunmi says.

Her goal is to ensure the highest quality educational experience for healthcare providers. And it’s her belief in the power of knowledge to create positive change and mentoring early career researchers in the medical and health professions space that drew her to this work.

Education for a rapidly evolving landscape

One of the significant challenges Bunmi aims to address is ensuring that medical education keeps up with the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.

She strives to develop innovative teaching methods and assessments that prepare medical professionals for the diverse situations they encounter. This involves influencing behaviour and changing knowledge, attitudes, and skills to improve competencies in facilitating learning in the clinical environment to deliver high-quality patient care.

“Scholarship in teaching is an investigation of the teaching/learning dynamic and the institutional context, reflection on this, and then changing practice. This has been my key teaching philosophy and one of the core principles I use in my role as a medical educator”, says Bunmi.

“My focus is on delivering and promoting high-quality teaching and learning programs in a research-rich environment that fosters professional expertise and intellectual curiosity.”

Pedagogy that pushes intellectual development

Teaching is a combination of science and art, shares Bunmi.

You need both sound knowledge and appropriate delivery skills to achieve excellence in the university learning environment.

Although teaching can never be perfect, it can be improved through a lecturer’s endeavours of seeking possible improvement through pedagogy and ongoing teaching practice.

In line with her teaching philosophy, Bunmi understands her responsibility to be well-prepared, provide guidance and structures to engage and support students in the process, and to use new strategies and tools to aid learning.

To engage her students in active learning, she promotes an inclusive and supportive curriculum through research-based learning structured around inquiry.

This involves considering the different learning needs and styles of her students, who are of different ages and come from diverse backgrounds. She also encourages them to learn from each other to improve intercultural communication skills.

“The primary objective of inquiry-based learning and a research-led teaching approach is to enhance my students’ critical thinking so they acquire more sophisticated levels of intellectual development and adopt deeper approaches to learning”, says Bunmi.

Collaboration is at the heart

Collaboration has been at the heart of Bunmi's ability to translate her research into action. Over the years, she’s partnered with experts from diverse backgrounds, including fellow educators, medical professionals, policymakers and researchers.

By working together, they’ve combined insights and resources to implement effective teaching strategies and assessments that benefit medical education globally.

One such collaboration is Bunmi’s significant contributions as co-lead investigator on an international collaborative and innovative project between 18 medical schools to improve quality assurance practices and foster benchmarking of clinical performance.

This international collaboration, Australasian Collaboration for Clinical Assessment in Medicine (ACCLAiM), was funded by a $210,000 Category-1 Office of Learning and Teaching grant and has led to over 15 peer-reviewed and 22 conference publications in the top 25 per cent of medical education journals and OTTAWA, AMEE and ANZAHPE conferences.

“It has had a significant educational impact in providing a more robust, yet flexible, assessment system for benchmarking clinical competence and building capacity and communities of practice amongst medical educators,” says Bunmi.

“It has also provided the participating medical schools with valid quality-assured data on the competency of their students in key clinical areas—and promoted critical reflection. Plus, it has been a great professional development exercise for me.”

Advancing knowledge and assessments

Bunmi’s research has had tangible effects on medical education worldwide.

Her track record of successful visionary leadership and experience guiding collaborative research communities to create the highest levels of institutional academic accomplishment in diverse multicultural and multidisciplinary research-intensive university environments in Australia, Asia and Africa is internationally recognised.

This includes the development of a sustainable health workforce, delivering cutting-edge innovative medical education research, mentoring new/early career academic staff, and supervising undergraduate and higher degree research students to successful and timely completion.

It also includes the promotion of excellence in teaching and learning, development, implementation and evaluation of innovative curricula, and delivery of exceptional student learning experiences.

The breadth of her research is extensive and aligns with One Health's intent through her contributions to more than one area of specialty: medical education, assessment, evaluation and animal science.

However, assessment is the main focus of her academic work, and her long-term vision is to be a world leader and mentor in advancing knowledge and innovative approaches to assessment in medical education.

To this end, Bunmi recently published two books: Understanding Assessment in Medical Education through Quality Assurance and Introduction to Research Methods for Undergraduate Health Profession Students.

She also ranked in the Elsevier World’s Top 2% Scientists for the Year Impact-2020 Category.

ACHIEVE-ing better outcomes

Knowing that her work has contributed to improving lives, fostering innovation, and addressing pressing challenges motivates Bunmi every day.

“The opportunity to work with brilliant minds from different backgrounds and to contribute to a better future is incredibly exciting and fulfilling. Witnessing the impact of improved medical education and assessment on individual lives and the healthcare system motivates me to continue pushing boundaries and striving for innovation in this critical field.”

By introducing effective teaching techniques and assessments, she’s contributing to better-prepared doctors equipped to provide excellent medical services, ultimately leading to improved healthcare outcomes.

Her teaching experience and full commitment to excellence have been acknowledged and rewarded with University Learning and Teaching awards and grants.

Her outstanding and sustained teaching leadership is evidenced by the high-level mentorship that she provides to her postgraduate students. This has resulted in a scholarship of teaching and research outputs of over 200 publications in high-impact-factor peer-reviewed journals.

Most recently, Bunmi and her peers celebrated the birth of the Academy for Collaborative Health Interprofessional Education and Vibrant Excellence (ACHIEVE), officially launched on Thursday, 20 July 2023, by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle, Professor Alex Zelinsky.

“ACHIEVE highlights the power of interprofessional collaboration in the field of Health Professions Education (HPE) and the profound significance of working together to advance training, research, and leadership in healthcare,” shares Bunmi.

“Why is interprofessional collaboration so crucial? Because no single individual or professional group possesses all the answers. But by working together, we can make a real impact and ACHIEVE great outcomes.”