Professor Della Freeth
Professor of Professional Education
Room 315
Garrod Building
Turner Street
London E1 2AD
0207 882 2224
As Professor of Professional Education, Della works alongside a wide range of health professionals to research and promote the conditions necessary to support high quality learning in workplaces, simulated environments and classrooms. She has particular interests in education that supports patient safety; learning through simulated professional practice and interprofessional collaboration. Her current research projects include:
• A methodological study examining different approaches to evaluating safety culture and triangulating these with audit assessments of evidence-based markers of the quality of care.
Funder: NIHR-MRC Methods: Survey, semi-structured observation, audit
• Studying facilitation in clinical simulation centres and then producing faculty development materials to help promote accomplished facilitation and support the transfer of learning between simulation and clinical workplaces.
Funder: London Deanery STeLI Methods: Observation, appreciative inquiry interviews
Della supervises full-time and part-time doctoral students on a wide range of topics that concern the learning of health professionals or practice development in clinical teams. Current and recent topics include: developing a CPD model to allow a targeted approach to supporting practice development based on a case study of occupational therapists in a mental health and learning disabilities trust; examining partnership working between a clinical team and ethnic minority children with diabetes; the regulation of communication to manage risk status within a forensic mental health unit; examining how midwifery students learn evidence-based practice; evaluating an instrument designed to structure the formative and summative assessments clinical mentors make of nursing students; developing mentorship practices to support nursing students in Saudi Arabia.
Della is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Interprofessional Care and an honorary member of the Centre for Faculty Development, St Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto faculty of Medicine, Canada.