Page 27 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

The Role of the Professional Doctorate in Developing Professional Practice in STEM Subjects

A Health Scientist Reflects on Professional Doctorates in Health Subjects

Many people from health backgrounds are attracted to the concept of professional doctorates. The strong
NHS (UK National Health Service) focus on the development of practice makes the professional doctor-
ate very attractive to healthcare staff. The professional doctorate provides the opportunity to provide a
rigorous structured approach to the development of practice and allows a contextualization against the
academic literature. It also necessitates a methodological framework which ensures rigor and consistency
in the development of practice. While interdisciplinary working is well established in the NHS, many
health care professional still retain a strong professional identity. Interestingly, when they reflect on
their work and its development they often see that the community of practice is actually a very different
group. For example, one senior nurse with a high professional profile, on examination and reflection
actually found her community of practice was an interdisciplinary group of quality assurance managers.
The professional doctorate attracts arrange of healthcare professions from all professions and from
people at all stages in the career. However, in our experience there are three broad groups. This is similar
to that as described by Costley and Lester (2010) in that there are three broad groups of candidates, and
these groupings transcend any professional group.
The commonest and are therefore the largest group are and are developing a particular area of practice
mid-career professionals who have undertaken a series of usually small scale projects, usually developing
a specific area of practice and see the professional doctorate as a way of further developing their work.
The particular challenges lies in identifying the particular theme which runs through what is often a
series of disparate projects, and also to identify their community of practice.
An example of this is one candidate who is a senior nurse and had in the course of her career, un-
dertaken a series of practice development projects. As her career progressed these projects became
increasing sophisticated, the professional doctorate allowed the opportunity to reflect and examine this
work and establish the clear themes which ran throughout. One clear issue which emerged was the need
for a structured framework against which the practice developments could be assessed. This led her to
establish further initiatives and thereby develop a model of practice development.
A less common scenario is the early career professional who comes with a project they wish to develop
and in many ways this is not dissimilar to the PhD, although as it is a professional doctorate there must
be strong practice focus present in the research. An example of one of our candidates who worked on
such an approach was (again) a nurse working at strategic level, building on previous work, she explored
models of work force planning and demonstrated the ways in which a rigorous and systematic approach
could lead to better outcomes, in terms of the overall patient experience.
The last group are people who have retired or are at the end of their career, they have an impressive
body of work which they put together in a portfolio accompanied by a commentary which indicates
their contribution to practice. An example of this is one candidate who is a health professional, who
although not at the end of her career had a well-established position at a national strategic level. She had
both influenced and been involved in the formulation of national policies, and also in their evolution.
Her work involved the compilation of a portfolio illustrating the variety of initiatives and demonstrating
how her work had affected policy.
One thing which all of the approaches undertaken in the professional doctorate have in common was
that they all had an effect on patient care and were about improving the patient experience. No matter
how seemingly removed from patient care, without exemption there was a demonstrable impact on patient

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