Teaching

I teach at the School of Medicine, University of St Andrews. One of the things that I do is to run communication skills workshops with undergraduate medical students. These have the aim of giving hands-on experience to students (6-8 per group) of talking and interacting with simulated patients (mostly actors who have been helping us out in this capacity). As a health psychologist, I find it very interesting to learn from my students too about how they think about doctor-patient interaction and how they handle the difficult situations. I also give lectures relating to behavioural medicine in the first and third year of the curriculum.

I’m also teaching a module in our MSc in Health Psychology course. My module is the last one in the course and it’s called ‘Health information, Prevention, and Decision making’. This module brings together everything that the students on the course learns up until then and also aims to give an overview about the applications of health psychology by having sessions from health psychologists that work in the NHS and their interactions with simulated patients.

If you’re interested in learning more about the course please visit the MSc course website.