Amy is the lead for Academic Support for P and F year and has acted as responsible examiner for the early years. Her main areas of research currently relate to learning empathy, team-working and mindfulness. Amy regularly acts as a personal tutor providing one to one educational coaching and support to students and she is interested in the well-being, success and job satisfaction of health professionals and students. At one point in time Amy trained horses and taught horse-back riding for a living, and these experiences taught her much about learning, body language, authenticity and communication!
Amy comes from a background in research health psychology and critical social and organisational psychology with an MSc from the London School of Economics. She has over 20 years’ experience teaching in medical education. Amy has designed and tested a 5-week course on Interpersonal Mindfulness for medical students and health professionals and has presented promising results at conferences and meetings – both at home and Internationally. This work formed her recently completed PhD thesis. Amy has collaborated on projects with the UK council for clinical communication and the internal e-learning team, developing video-based learning materials for students to access on-line. On occasion, Amy presents and teaches on mindfulness, trauma-informed care, and well-being externally. She provides transformational interpersonal mindfulness coaching and is committed to improving the experience of medical students and doctors, whilst supplementing their capacity to engage in education and foster cultural safety and wellbeing.
Joekes, K., Brown, J., Boardman, K., Tincknell, L., Evans, D., & Spatz, A. (2016). Hybrid simulation for integrated skills teaching. International Journal of Clinical Skills, 10(1).
Ussher M., Spatz A., Copland C, Nicolaou A, Cargill A, Amini-Tabrizi N, McCracken, L. Immediate effects of a brief mindfulness-based body scan on patients with chronic pain. J Behav Med, October 2012.
Webb C, Collin SM, Deave T, Haig-Ferguson A, Spatz A, Crawley E. What stops children with a chronic illness accessing health care: a mixed methods study in children with CFS/ME. BMC Health Services Research, 11, 308 (2011) www.biomedcentral.com
Zakrzewska JM, Jorns TP, Spatz AL. Patient led conferences - who attends, are their expectations met and do they vary in three different countries? Eur J Pain. 2009 May;13(5):486-91
Spatz AL, Zakrzewska JZ, & Kay EJ. Decision analysis of surgical and medical treatment for trigeminal neuralgia: How patient evaluations of benefits and risks affect the treatment decision. Pain, 2007 Oct;131(3):302-1
The majority of Amy’s time at St George's is spent on teaching; whether developing, planning or delivering and evaluating. She regularly gives enthusiastic lectures to post-graduate and undergraduate students on a wide range of subjects related to communication, health psychology and education: empathy, giving, receiving feedback, chronic pain, functional symptoms and more. She especially enjoys facilitating small group experiential learning while working with simulated patients (actors) on subjects such as patient-centred interviewing techniques, history taking, information giving, and advanced clinical communication skills for senior clinicians. She also consults in the NHS on team-working for improving patient safety as well as well-being for staff.