How to create and host your own medical education course

How was Cornerstone Medical born?

I have been interested in medical education for a very long time and have taught medicine from as far back as I can remember.  When I completed GP training, I became the RCGP First5 lead in Leicestershire so I began putting on medical events one evening a month at different restaurants around Leicester. We started off with only 10 people and over time our network grew to include 250 young, dynamic GPs all equally as passionate about education as me. 

As I approached the milestone of my 50th educational event, I decided I wanted to do something special.  My wife and I sat down together one day over dinner and thought - why not make our own medical education company?

How did this Minor Surgery course come into existence?

Having arranged the standard 'lecture-style' courses previously, I wanted to do something different and more hands-on, and decided to go out on a limb and try a minor surgery course.

What makes you different from other minor surgery courses?

I wanted to make mine more tailored towards GPs as I am a GP myself and understand what works for us. I decided to charge a much lower rate to try to reach as may GPs as possible and make it much more hands-on than other courses tend to be.

Are you planning to create more courses in the future and in any other subjects?

We have a course coming up in February about "mythbusting pathology results", are planning another minor surgery course in March, a pessary training day for April or May and then hitting the road to run some courses in Birmingham in the summer!

Where do you see Cornerstone Medical 5 years from now?

In 5 years, I am hoping that we will become a household name as leading experts in medical education and hope to have held a medical event in every major city in the UK!

What are the challenges that you encountered?

I can go on for a few days just on this topic! I am lucky that, though I have faced many, many challenges over the last 4 years when setting up educational events, I have always learnt great lessons from them and that means I seldom repeat the same mistake twice. 

Any advice / top tips for people wanting to build their own course in any subject of their interest?

My main advice is that if you are passionate about delivering education in a particular field, do not shy away from hard work. Spend time brainstorming ideas, make sure you understand what you want to achieve when putting on an event, plan for adversity and if things don't quite go to plan, keep your chin up, learn from what went wrong and go again. 

Cornerstone Medical advertise their courses on SimplyCPD, along with many other big-name course providers.  SimplyCPD is a free app is designed for doctors to source quality and relevant CPD easily and is available to download now for free on the App Store and Google Play.