Cara Bezzina

Dr. Cara Bezzina is a medical education researcher with appointments across three prestigious Scottish institutions: University of Glasgow (General Practice and Primary Care), University of Dundee (Centre for Medical Education, School of Medicine), and University of Aberdeen (School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition). As a Wellcome Trust-funded fellow in the Multimorbidity Doctoral Training Programme, her work bridges clinical practice and educational theory to address critical gaps in undergraduate medical training.

Dr. Bezzina's research focuses on how medical students experience and learn from complex patient encounters, particularly those involving multimorbidity, communication challenges, and emotionally charged situations. Her recent qualitative study with senior medical students from Aberdeen and Glasgow revealed that students feel systematically shielded from complexity during training, leaving them unprepared for real-world practice where single-disease frameworks are inadequate.

Her findings highlight four key themes: students' definitions of complexity (focusing on complex communication and emotionally charged learning), barriers to learning from complex patients (including being shielded from complexity and working in a 'broken system'), the critical role of medical educators, and preparation for practice. Dr. Bezzina advocates for a paradigm shift where students are actively encouraged to engage with complexity under appropriate supervision, rather than being protected from these essential learning experiences.

Her notable contributions include:

• Revealing how students define complexity through biopsychosocial lenses beyond simple multimorbidity
• Identifying how supervisors' tendencies to shield students from complex cases limits learning opportunities
• Proposing practical frameworks for educators to scaffold students' engagement with complexity
• Highlighting the importance of creating safe spaces for students to process challenging clinical encounters

Dr. Bezzina's work has significant implications for medical curriculum development, emphasizing that exposure to and engagement with complex patients offers critical learning opportunities that can better equip future physicians for contemporary healthcare challenges.