C21: One Year On
Foreword
Dear colleagues
For some time after we announced in January 2011 that the C21 project was underway, people kept asking me – in some cases, I suspect, rather sceptically - when they would start to see the promised changes start to happen around the medical school.
Over time, enquiries of that sort have become rarer and I hope they will soon become a thing of the past. Few people can have failed to notice by now that things are starting to happen. As this progress report on the C21 project shows, a vast amount of planning and preparation has been going on during the last year, and more and more work streams are up and running with literally hundreds of people getting involved. It is very exciting to see the project taking shape with the help of our many partners.
Cardiff School of Medicine is engaged in a huge and ambitious undertaking – the biggest root and branch review and transformation of its undergraduate medical education programme since the medical school was first formed in 1921. So it’s worth taking a moment to remember why we’re doing it.
We want to ensure that Cardiff is graduating great doctors who understand people and the world in which we all live and work. Great doctors, fully equipped with the right knowledge and skills to practise safely and compassionately, aren’t just “born that way” – they are produced, as a result of great medical education. Our medical students, and the patients whom they will eventually treat, deserve the very best we can give them both now and for the future. The C21 project has at its heart a commitment to achieving excellence in patient care through world class medical education.
Thank you to all those wonderful people who have rolled up their sleeves and got on with this enormous task. As always, the Dean of Medicine, Professor Paul Morgan and I are happy to answer questions and are looking forward to hearing from you with your offers of help and involvement, and any comments you may have, be they negative or positive. Through working together we will achieve our aim of producing high-quality, innovative and patient-focused medical education for future generations of doctors.
Ys JB
For more detail, read C21: Progress - One Year On