Sarah Bradley

About me:

I am a Senior Lecturer/Senior Clinical Skills Tutor at the University of Exeter Medical School, with responsibility for Clinical Skills teaching and assessment. This includes procedural skills, physical examination, clinical communication, resuscitation and simulation. I also teach on the PGCertMedEd. I have 15 years’ experience as a medical educator and have a particular interest in clinical communication, assessment of clinical competence and professional identity formation.

My research interest is in the assessment of clinical competence, with a focus on qualitative assessment.

I am a registered nurse and prior to working in medical education worked for the NHS, specialising in Coronary Care.

I am currently in the second year of the pre-thesis phase of the EdD (generic).

To date, my research has focused on quality assurance of the competence of medical graduates, the pedagogy of clinical skills teaching and assessment, and the professional identity formation of undergraduate medical students.

My thesis proposal is for a mixed methods study of the value and utility of qualitative assessment of clinical competence. It seeks to establish the inter-rater reliability of a model for qualitative assessment of undergraduate medical students’ clinical skills, to understand the processes by which raters interpret comments and to explore students’ perceptions of the fairness of qualitative assessment.