The value of near-peer teaching in the medical curriculum

Vinay Jamnadas Sonagara, Swina Santhirakumaran, Harkaran Singh Kalkat Department of Undergraduate Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK According to the General Medical Council’s guide for “Good Medical Practice”, doctors are expected to partake in active mentoring roles and contribute to the education of other training doctors.1 This reflects the fact that medical education is an apprenticeship where the vertical transmission of knowledge from peers and colleagues contributes to a large proportion of the necessary clinical training. Therefore, peer teaching skills should be inculcated from an early stage. At Imperial College London, student-led societies encourage the cohort to take on mentoring and teaching roles to students in earlier years, in the form of near-peer teaching. However, this near-peer teaching largely remains a voluntary undertaking. Given the importance of these skills, there is an argument to be made that such tutoring schemes ought to form a more extensive and mandatory part of the medical syllabus