Lancaster University has nominated several staff members for two prestigious awards run by Advance HE, the national body for the recognition of teaching in the UK.

These are an individual award – the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) award - and a team award – the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE).

The process of selecting institutional nominees for these national awards is led by Professor Sharon Huttly ProVC (Education) who chairs a panel made up of Associate Deans for teaching from each faculty and previous NTFS winners.

Professor Adam Taylor and Dr Liz Brewster from Lancaster Medical School are individual nominees for the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme.

Professor Taylor has brought new opportunities for learning about Anatomy to students for example through the use of the Anatomage table and using real CT and MRI scans as part of the teaching, learning and assessment process. He also includes his own research based on assessing the public’s knowledge of anatomy in order to help medical students communicate better with their patients.

He has already won several awards including a LUSU Student nominated teaching prize in 2016; the Pilkington Teaching Prize in 2017 and the American Association of Anatomists’ Basmajian Award in 2019.

Dr Liz Brewster bases her teaching on an understanding of health from a sociocultural approach rather than a purely biomedical model. While medical students learn about pathologies, one of the challenges is to help them to think about how to help patients to live well.

Her ethos is to create a learning environment which challenges students and encourages them to participate as critical thinkers and independent learners, whilst making the environment as inclusive and collaborative as possible.

The Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) recognises and rewards collaborative work that has a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning.

The team - the Lancaster Design Collaborative for Inter-Professional Ethics Education - includes Jane Pye and Hannah Morgan from Social Work, Phil Spencer and Laura Machin from the Medical School and Clare Dixon from Clinical Psychology.

Their approach to designing interprofessional sessions for the learning of health and social care ethics is innovative, with realistic conversations and debates from a range of viewpoints, which enable medical, social work, paramedicine, and clinical psychology students to explore challenging issues such as end-of-life care.

The team have also been nominated for a Pilkington Teaching Award.

Their teaching designs for interprofessional ethics learning have been picked up and implemented nationally by South Bank and Swansea with learning shared at an international level with Oslo Met University.