Elizabeth Armitage-Chan
Mrs Elizabeth Armitage-Chan MA VetMB FHEA DipACVA MRCVS
RCVS Specialist in Veterinary Anaesthesia
Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Education
echan@rvc.ac.uk
Liz qualified from Cambridge Vet School in 2001 and spent 4 years at Tufts University in the USA as an Intern then resident in Anaesthesia. She worked as a Lecturer in Anaesthesia at the Royal Veterinary College from 2005 to 2009 before leaving to work in specialty practice, returning in 2013 as a Lecturer in Veterinary Education. Liz is particularly interested in the development of professional and non-clinical skills.
As well as her RVC work, Liz is continuing to make good progress with her PhD at King’s College London on the use of narrative inquiry to explore professional identity formation in early career veterinary surgeons. Narrative inquiry involves the use of stories to understand how the authors see themselves; through this Liz is asking recent RVC graduates to write short pieces about their experiences in practice, exploring the challenges they face and what they see as important aspects of their professional role. The collection of written narratives in an online forum represents a novel approach to narrative inquiry and Liz has presented her methodology at the Association for the Study of Medical Education research methods conference. She hopes that the stories she gathers will inform future developments in the Professional Studies Strand, something that we are already seeing through her application of the narratives from her CPD courses to create strand teaching themes. As a secondary finding, Liz is learning (sometimes the hard way!) how to engage people in thinking about veterinary professionalism, discovering the online prompts and strategies that do (and don’t) facilitate the recognition and discussion of professionalism and professional identity, and their importance to veterinary patient management.