Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the landscape of healthcare and education. From revision tools and OSCE preparation to clinical documentation and decision-making algorithms, AI has become an everyday companion for many students. Recognising this shift, a new co-created project at Queen Mary is bringing staff and students together to embed AI literacy across the MBBS and BDS curricula as a core skill for future clinicians.
We caught up with academic leads of the project Dr Sushma Saksena (Head of Year Five, Deputy Head Years 3-5, MBBS, IHSE) and Dr Cassie Lewis (Year One Co-lead, BDS, IoD), along with student lead Josh Soane (Year four MBBS), to learn how the project aims to prepare graduates for a world in which AI’s influence on clinical practice is only increasing.
This project has been awarded the President and Principal's Fund for Educational Excellence 2025–26. This fund was established to encourage a culture of educational innovation and exploration at Queen Mary. Check for more details at The President and Principal’s Fund for Educational Excellence - Queen Mary Academy.
About the project: why now?
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For many medical and dental students, AI tools like generative AI assistants are already part of everyday life. However, the team have seen how AI technologies have begun to influence learning informally, often without structure or guidance, and they were keen for QMUL to be sector leaders in tackling this issue.
“There has been a rapid shift in the application of AI within medicine and dentistry, especially in the last few years. It's one of the fastest evolving tools accessible to all of us and we need to harness it pro-actively, effectively and ethically.” Sushma explained. “Our intention in undertaking this project is to help co-create, with our students and staff, doctors and dentists of tomorrow who are AI-conscious, AI confident and AI competent.”
For Josh, the informal use among peers was a major motivator for joining the project. He notes that AI tools have become embedded in daily academic life: “Everyone’s using it for all sorts of purposes I haven't even thought of… practising for their OSCEs… mock questions… explaining concepts.”
His central concern was that while AI use was growing rapidly, curriculum change remained slow. Students were already making extensive use of these tools, with varying levels of understanding and risk awareness. The project team saw a clear need to help the curriculum “catch up.”
Project Details: A Co-created Framework
From the outset, the project was designed as a genuine co-creation between staff and students.
As Cassie noted, the student voice was a ‘founding’ principle of the project: Ensuring that the project was “grounded in what our students felt they need and it wasn’t just the sort of top-down assumptions we as tutors or as educators or as fully trained medics and dentists make”
The group has a core team of eight with a breadth of expertise and also includes Professor Chie Adachi (Dean for Digital Education), Mr Nick Fisher (Lecturer in Medical Education, Digital Design) , Dr Shabana Bharmal (Clinical Lecturer, Community based Medical Education) , Mr Jeremy Pullicino (Clinical Lecturer Malta campus) , Ms Lyndsey Shirah (Careers and Enterprise QMUL) and Dr Mohmed Elbadawi (Programme Director of MSc AI in the Biosciences). As Sushma described, “This diversity of backgrounds has helped to form a particularly cohesive team. We meet fortnightly but communicate almost daily – our team has this camaraderie and a ‘yes, we can’ approach which has helped us to work our way through setbacks”.
Surveys, focus groups, interviews and literature reviews form the foundation for developing a framework that maps where and how AI literacy is legitimately and innovatively embedded within the curricula. Students and staff are not just study participants but involved in both design and delivery of each of these key aspects of the project. Through conducting surveys and focus groups, the hope is to gather robust input from students and staff as well as other stakeholders including professional regulators, assessors and colleagues from across QMUL involved in related projects
Josh describes the co-creation process as deeply collaborative, highlighting that from the beginning, he felt treated as an equal partner. The students’ knowledge of AI, and their lived experience using it, is being actively leveraged. As he explains, even drafting the successful funding application was deeply collaborative: “I wrote just as much of it as they did.”
Cassie and Sushma also highlighted how students have embraced the challenges of the project so readily. As Sushma noted, one of the “nicest parts of this project is how students' enthusiasm is almost infectious”
Challenges: Ethics, Safety, and the Pace of Change
Although the project is still in its early stages, the team has already identified a few challenges that need careful navigation.
- Ethical and data-security concerns
One major issue is how students and clinicians currently use open AI tools. Through surveys and observation, the team has found that some users may input sensitive information into publicly accessible systems without appreciating where the data goes or how it might be used.
As Josh noted, “I've seen both qualified doctors and medical students… putting quite sensitive information into AI tools.”
As part of the project, the team took care in selecting a secure AI platform within QMUL to ensure that data remains within a closed system, modelling the safe professional behaviour they hope to promote in the curriculum. There have been logistical challenges in accessing this, which has been a learning curve, and the group have navigated this by producing guidance to make explicit how AI should be used within the project. - The speed of AI vs. the speed of curriculum change
AI developments move in days to months; curricular reform often moves in years. This tension creates challenges for embedding AI competencies and ensuring they remain relevant as the technology continues to evolve rapidly. As Cassie and Sushma shared, there is a lot within literature on what aspects of AI need to be included within curricula, but not how and when to deliver these within in the curriculum. Being able to fill this gap in a pedagogically sound manner is a really exciting prospect for them.
Staff also vary widely in their use and familiarity with AI — some have decades of clinical experience but minimal exposure to these emerging tools. The co-creation approach helps bridge this gap, enabling students and staff to learn from one another and shape a shared curriculum vision.
Advice for others: ‘Find collaborators and get stuck in.’
For academics and students considering similar projects, the team emphasises the power of starting small and building momentum. Josh explains that the project itself emerged from a series of quick conversations shortly before the funding deadline: “Over the course of a week, we had a completely blank application page and… were able to clump together a really interesting proposal.”
He also stresses that interest among students is extremely high — the project had eight paid positions for student partners, and nearly 140 students applied. Cassie and Sushma highlighted that it was eye-opening to see how engaged our students were with AI and the fantastic range of activities they are pursuing in their own time outside of university.
Next Steps
The project is ambitious, with numerous deliverables, and at times it has been challenging for the team to stay on top of everything. However, the team is pleased to be on track, with ethics approval secured and strong engagement from both students and staff so far. With around 150 survey responses already collected, the team is now looking forward to hosting a workshop on 18 March. This session will serve as a key milestone, enabling the group to present an early draft of the framework and a toolkit for embedding AI in the curriculum, along with invited guest speakers who are inspiring role models in the field of AI and education. It will also allow them to gather additional insights and engage a broader community of staff and students.
Later in the spring, the project team plans to share further updates, including refinements to the framework, outputs from the workshop, and learning that may inform wider adoption beyond the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. We look forward to catching up with them again later this year to see how the project has progressed.
Get involved
If you would like to add your voice to the project, the team is still looking for survey participants. Please see the call of action below.