Program: PhD in Family Medicine
Department of Family Medicine
School of Medicine
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
McGill University

Thesis title: Cultural safety in medical education: transformative learning through co-designing serious games in Colombia
Short biography

Dr. Pimentel-Gonzalez, whose work was supervised by Dr. Neil Andersson and Dr. Anne Cockfort, defended his PhD thesis in March 2021. His thesis aimed to foster cultural safety in medical training through game-based education of medical students and interns in Colombia. “My initial exploratory community-based learning experiences showed interesting results,” he explains. “However, this type of learning required way more time than packed medical curricula can accommodate. I also wanted to explore teaching methods that are congruent with the way modern medical students learn.” Methods included a scoping review, sequential qualitative studies, a pilot and full-scale randomised controlled trial, and a narrative evaluation of the most significant change experienced by medical students after cultural safety training. More than 650 people including medical students, traditional medicine users, researchers and educators were involved in the project.

“I see myself as a clinician-scientist,” says Dr. Pimentel-Gonzalez. Now that he completed his PhD, he wants to continue to advance the cultural safety and intercultural medicine approaches based on three professional areas: clinical practice, medical education and research. He plans to return to Colombia to engage in capacity building for a few years. In addition, he will resume his clinical practice as a general practitioner, teach what he has learned in his doctoral studies and keep conducting community-based projects. In terms of long-term goals, Dr. Pimentel-Gonzalez endeavours to pursue a residency in Family Medicine and post doctoral studies.