Papers with Purpose: Writing Workshops for Research Impact with early career Health Professions Education Scholars in Southern Africa

Health Professions Education (HPE) is a powerful field impacting on education that extends to health systems and patient care. In the global South, whilst educational and health inequities remain, HPE seeks to transform these realities through quality postgraduate training and scholarship. In South Africa, HPE research is rapidly growing, however, formal educational qualifications and scholarly outputs remain low in comparison to that of the global North. This global knowledge hierarchy has significant implications for both knowledge production for epistemic justice as well as the pragmatics of educational practices and outcomes in the health sciences that is culturally inappropriate, and contextually ineffective as ‘best evidence’ from vast contexts of the global North (Sims & Cilliers, 2023; Sims, 2023b). Therefore, our programme seeks to close these gaps with writing workshops coupled with conference participation to strengthen the networks of HPE doctoral students and early career researchers from Southern Africa.

Workshop Team: Dr Danica Sims, University of Oxford; Dr Natashia Muna, University of Cape Town; Ms Taahira Goolam Hoosen, University of Cape Town; Professor Francois Cilliers, University of Cape Town.