Stepping down from a national role

At the end of this year, my term as Lead for Simulation on the British Orthopaedic Association’s Education and Careers Committee comes to a close. Six years is a long time to sit on a national committee as a volunteer alongside a full clinical job, and it feels like the right moment to write down what the role actually taught me — not the job description, but the parts that changed how I think about surgical education.

Digital wasn’t the innovation — sustaining it was

When I took this role on, “digital education” in orthopaedics still largely meant putting a lecture on a webpage. The pandemic had already forced that shift everywhere, including in my own work building the Postgraduate Virtual Learning Environment from scratch in the first lockdown. The genuinely hard problem was never getting a session recorded — it was building something that would still be useful, still be maintained, and still be trusted three or four years later, long after the person who built it had moved on.

That’s the thread that has run through the committee’s work in national curriculum delivery — recorded teaching sessions uploaded and made genuinely accessible to core trainees, rather than existing as a one-off pandemic response. It is a slower, less glamorous kind of progress than launching something new, but it’s the kind that actually holds up.

Simulation is still finding its place

If I’m honest, simulation training in orthopaedics is still working out where it belongs in the curriculum, rather than being fully embedded within it. There’s real appetite for it — from trainees, from training programme directors, from the committee itself — but appetite alone doesn’t produce a national guideline or a validated assessment. That takes sustained, unglamorous committee work: agreeing standards, testing platforms, writing guidance that will actually be used rather than filed away. I don’t think that work is finished, and I don’t think it should be seen as a six-year project with a neat endpoint — it’s the kind of thing that needs continuity of ownership, which is exactly why a proper handover to whoever takes this on next matters more than anything I could write here.

The technology conversation has changed

Six years ago, the committee’s digital conversations were mostly about platforms and access. Now they’re increasingly about artificial intelligence — its role in exam question writing, in workforce modelling, in identifying where future training capacity will actually be needed. I find this genuinely exciting, but it comes with a responsibility I don’t think the profession has fully grappled with yet: AI is very good at producing plausible-looking answers to workforce and education questions, and much worse at telling you when it doesn’t actually know. Committees like this one exist precisely to provide the clinical judgement that stops a plausible answer being mistaken for a correct one. That role doesn’t go away as the tools get better — if anything, it becomes more important.

What I’d tell someone starting this role

Volunteer committee roles like this one run entirely on people who are already stretched thin giving up time they don’t really have. That’s true of everyone I’ve sat alongside on this committee, and it’s true of the people quietly leaving alongside me this year. The honest advice I’d give anyone taking on a role like this is to pick one or two things you can actually finish, rather than trying to be responsible for the whole digital agenda — the committee is bigger than any one lead, and it should be. My own instinct, formed from running the PGVLE, is that infrastructure outlasts personality only if you build it that way deliberately, not by accident.

I’m proud of the small, durable pieces of this work — the sessions that are still being watched, the exam platform that’s still being refined rather than abandoned, the groundwork laid for a proper simulation guideline. None of it was ever going to be finished by December 2026, and that was never really the point. The point was to leave it in better shape than I found it, and to leave it in the hands of people who will keep doing that after I’ve gone.