Professor Ged Byrne

National Teaching Fellow 2009 Ged Byrne was appointed senior lecturer and consultant surgeon in Manchester in 2001 and Hospital Dean for Clinical Studies in 2004. During his eclectic training as an academic surgeon in Glasgow, India and the West Midlands he developed a keen interest in postgraduate surgical teaching and was Secretary and President of the Association of Surgeons in Training. He combines clinical practice as a surgeon and responsibility for delivery of the undergraduate curriculum to 450 Manchester medical students with the innovation, development and evaluation of high quality learning and assessment tools. As Hospital Dean for Clinical Studies, Ged has successfully increased his local educational budget by 500% in five years and enhanced student learning by overseeing the conversion of two local district general hospitals into Associated Teaching Hospitals, providing a significant expansion in learning opportunities for healthcare students. Ged passionately believes in personalised learning; he has introduced an evidence-based individualised programme of teaching for poorly performing students and a student appraisal system for medical undergraduates. Ged is best known as the Director and co-founder of the Universities Medical Assessment Partnership (UMAP). Originally a collaboration of five medical schools funded by a project grant from the Higher Education Funding Council, UMAP is now a partner-funded collaboration of 15 medical schools which develops high quality assessment items for summative medical examinations. UMAP has been commended as a beacon of excellence in assessment practice by many national and international educational bodies and has been responsible for training over 1000 clinical teachers in the process of item writing and quality assurance. Ged has recently established an academy of healthcare education in South Manchester which he sees as a model for multi-professional healthcare educational delivery for the future. By creating a partnership of local community, local healthcare providers and the University, he believes that higher quality learning environments for adult learners will be created, ultimately allowing a sustainable improvement in patient safety and care.