This project led Doyle to medical education, as she began lecturing and, once she completed her PhD in 2019, she joined HPEC, RCSI’s Health Professional Educational Centre as a research officer. The 9 months she worked there were “like an apprenticeship in medical education. So much was happening so quickly in medical education due to the COVID pandemic, and so many things had to be changed, I got involved in everything I could.” She also began working with BEME, the Best Evidence Medical Education Collaboration, contributing to two major reviews which were direct responses to the COVID pandemic.

Following this, she took the opportunity to move to RCSI SIM. This, she notes, was “a logical next step to continue down the medical education route” as she introduced training devices to her teaching and contributed to a simulation based communication skills course for child safeguarding: an inter-professional, inter-agency course attended by nurses, doctors, social workers, guards and lawyers among others. “Working with a team led by Prof Walter Eppich, Chair of RCSI SIM, we designed the course and ran it twice. We used the process of design based research which facilitates iterative refinement: you do it, learn from it, and then implement it again, until satisfied. We got wonderful feedback from the health professionals who attended the course letting us know that they’ve changed their practice, and have a greater understanding of their roles and the roles of other professionals as a result of the course.”

In 2021 Doyle began an IRC fellowship, working on an interventional radiology programme, with Prof Eppich, and Dr Claire Condron, Director Education at RCSI SIM, peof Colin Cantwell Consultsnt Interventional Radiologist, St Vincent's Hospital, and Prof Richard Arnett, Director of Psychometrics RCSI. This position came with many challenges because at the time there was no structure to interventional radiology training for graduate radiologists. She therefore began to design mastery-based learning curriculum through simulation. “The goal of the course is that everybody will reach competency,” she explains, “it just requires a bit more time for some versus others on different clinical competencies. This allows people to achieve mastery of these skills. The time it takes to achieve the standard is different for everyone.” Concurrently, she explored the wider landscape of interventional radiology, running a consensus study around the country to ascertain what key competencies should be focused on, and conducting cognitive task analyses to see radiology practices carried out as opposed to simply being theoretical discussions.

During all this time, what has Doyle’s experience of RCSI been like? Describing the “phenomenal centre” she works in, what becomes clear is the interdisciplinary and innovative nature of the work being conducted there. She describes a support atmosphere for all the department team members to be engaged in research “the line has started to blur between operations and research, and a lot of our technicians are getting more involved in structured research projects and programs.” The people she works with include people with backgrounds in technical equipment such as audio/visuals, as they often film simulated medical scenarios so students can reflect on what they see to consolidate their learning. There are technicians working in special effects and makeup for scars and injuries, and simulated participants who attend the training workshops to act out scenarios as patients. She highlights the necessity of enjoying your working environment: “that's where innovation and creativity come from.”

Indeed, Doyle’s own research has required a high degree of interdisciplinarity: when working with her supervisor Dr Jacinta Browne (Mayo Clinic), they started developing material for a training device that would feel like real tissue, as often materials used in training devices do not image well under ultrasound. Doyle’s personal project was to investigate how to make different types of tissue. She highlights the collaboration with the arts and humanities that made this process possible: “I worked with John Walsh the head of TU Dublin’s School Art and Design, and their work was nominated for a “Research and Education” design award from the Institute of Designers in Ireland. It was lovely to see our research from a different point of view, because I was so used to looking at it as science and education.”

Doyle stresses the importance of collaboration in her work: “my question starting a new piece of work is, who are we working with? In our child safeguarding course, we had an emergency medicine paediatric consultant, a paramedic firefighter, and an ex-primary school teacher, all involved in a co-design process. What I'm learning is, often in science we try find a solution to a problem through siloed experimental research. But a lot of the time, it’s the people that are affected by the problem, and the people that are directly facing the problem, that have the answer.”