Using a theoretical framework to develop postgraduate health professions education research and practice

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Healthcare education is complex and multifaceted, requiring study from different angles and with different lenses. We propose that the use of a meta-framework can help those teaching and researching postgraduate health professions education make holistic sense of their practice and findings from different projects. We discuss how we have employed Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (EST) as an overarching theoretical framework for the scholarship of learning and teaching in the context of postgraduate health professions education. Taking a structured approach to pedagogical thinking and research through the use of a meta-framework opens up useful ways of framing findings and further questions, locating research projects within a bigger picture, and communicating to others the focus of a research programme. We address the problem of the under-theorizing of educational research in postgraduate health professions education, advocating both theoretical frameworks for individual research projects, and an overarching theoretical “meta-framework” to interrogate and draw together multiple studies. In doing so we build on, critique and further develop Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory.