Researcher and Head of School of Health Sciences, Charlotte Rees, is zealous about the research-teaching nexus. Her commitment to quality work in this lesser-funded field has led to exceptional SciVal metrics and policy and curricula change.

Professor Charlotte Rees Head of School School of Health Sciences

Charlotte has had a passion for learning and health since her school days.

Even in her first degree in psychology, she gravitated toward health before moving into behavioural sciences, completing her PhD and becoming a lecturer. From here, she shifted into medical education research and hasn’t looked back.

“I learnt early in my career that exceptional evidence-based medical (and health professions) education is key to developing and graduating the very best of tomorrow’s healthcare professionals and that those practitioners have central roles in improving patient health, dignity, safety and wellbeing,” says Charlotte.

“The latest advances in medicines, therapies and technologies are only as good as the healthcare professionals who use them. So, the human side of healthcare and health professions education has dominated my academic career.”

A med-ed academic performer

Despite the income generation challenges that come with this field of work, which is often viewed as the poor relative that falls between the gaps of medicine and health and social sciences, Charlotte is proving its value.

In fact, she’s showing that health professions education research can be conducted with small amounts of funding, resulting in high-quality internationally co-authored research outputs impacting positively on educational practices and policies.

Charlotte’s SciVal metrics – a research performance assessment tool – are impressive. She has an h-index of 41. She also has a FWCI=2.88, which means she has nearly three times the number of citations than the average for articles in her field for her 75 outputs published 2012-2021.

This includes 20.9 citations per output, 41.3 per cent of outputs in the top 10 per cent most cited worldwide, 72.7 per cent outputs in top decile journals, and 58.7 per cent internationally co-authored outputs.

Beyond this, Charlotte has over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and books. Plus, she’s co-authored over 200 conference presentations on diverse topics.

Topics include workplace learning, healthcare professionalism, identities and transitions, with diverse methodologies, such as qualitative longitudinal research, video-reflexive ethnography, narrative inquiry, and realist evaluation.

From research to practices and policy

Charlotte and her co-investigators continually work to translate their research findings into improved educational practices and policies. The goal is to benefit various stakeholders, including educators, curriculum developers, learners and even patients.

To these ends, they’ve conducted research funded by numerous industry and government bodies in the UK and Australia. This includes the UK Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, NHS Education for Scotland, the General Medical Council (UK), the Victorian Department of Health, and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.

This work has led to positive impacts on national policies and curricula, including learning, teaching, and assessment.

Professionalism research cited in health and beyond

“Probably my most significant real-world impacts have been through a decade-long body of healthcare professionalism work co-led with another colleague”, says Charlotte.

“Together, we’ve conducted an international program of work exploring healthcare students’ and professionals’ professionalism dilemma experiences during workplace learning and what students and professionals do in the face of those dilemmas and why.”

These dilemmas include professionalism lapses in patient consent, patient safety, patient dignity, workplace bullying/abuse, inter-professional working, and many more.

Their work on professionalism has had considerable impacts on the field of medical education. However, it has also benefited other non-research stakeholders.

“It has been cited in various policy documents focusing on professionalism, safe practice and speaking up in the UK/Australia. It has influenced public awareness of healthcare professionalism, garnered through considerable UK media engagement including national TV/radio and international print news, with an audience reach of over 14 million,” says Charlotte.

It was also published in 2017 as a Wiley-Blackwell textbook for healthcare students and educators – titled Healthcare Professionalism: Improving Practice through Reflections on Workplace Dilemmas – to help them manage and prevent professionalism lapses.

The book is now recommended reading in numerous healthcare programs worldwide, with over 25,000 full-text downloads and 1,000 hard copies sold.

As a result of this work, Charlotte was also recently named a top #5 author worldwide for medical professionalism research (with 30.73 citations per paper) through a 10-year bibliometric analysis of 2010-2019 publications (Song et al. 2021; published in Scientometrics).

Leading health research into the future

In her University of Newcastle role, Charlotte is driving the school’s strategic vision, providing academic leadership to ensure effective operational management and promoting and developing an effective workplace culture to nurture and reward excellence in research, education and leadership/engagement.

She has always obsessed over research quality and impact and takes every possible opportunity to advocate for quality and impact in medical and health professions education research.

Despite her high SciVal metrics, she recognises there’s always room for improvement – and no room for complacency. She also tries to walk the talk when conducting collaborative research.

As a researcher and research leader, she’s highly motivated to help others build their research capabilities, especially around quality, methodological and theoretical innovations, and impact.

“What excites me most about health professions education research is that it sits at the research-teaching nexus,” says Charlotte.

“As Principal Fellow of Advance HE, I’ve been privileged across my career to have innumerable opportunities to develop my strategic leadership enhancing student learning, develop strategies to help others in supporting learning, champion integrated approaches to academic practice, and engage in continuing professional development.”

Her next evidence-based and internationally co-edited book to Wiley-Blackwell for 2023 release is titled Foundations of Health Professions Education Research: Principles, Perspectives & Practices.

The hope for this piece of work is that it will help early and mid-career researchers to develop their research understandings and practices, therefore benefiting the quality, integrity, and impact of health professions education research into the future.