Slides, abstracts, and context for talks I’ve given at conferences, universities, and professional organisations — on artificial intelligence in health professions education and clinical practice.
For a curated overview of recent and upcoming talks, see the speaking page.
10 items under this folder.
An invited webinar for the Musculoskeletal Association of Chartered Physiotherapists. Explores what AI means for physiotherapy practice across the full information ecosystem of clinical work — from AI-assisted diagnosis and documentation to patient agency and the therapeutic relationship. The central concept is context sovereignty: AI systems work from professional context, and controlling that context is both the distinctive human contribution and the most practical skill for the AI age. The session covers the evidence for AI performance in clinical contexts, strategies for maintaining professional agency, how to actively support patients in using AI well, and how the therapeutic relationship is changing as practitioners and patients develop persistent AI agents.
A keynote for the 44th Annual Conference of the Physiotherapy Research Society. Argues that AI is now in contact with every part of the research process, and that the useful question is no longer whether researchers are using AI, but what they are using it for. Uses the PhD as a worked example to explore the difference between the artefact and the person becoming capable through the process, and argues that as AI becomes more capable, specifically human contributions — research taste, evaluative judgement, and the capacity to set direction — become more valuable, not less.
A keynote for the Royal College of Nursing's Education conference. Examines how generative AI has severed the inferential chain between assessment artifacts and the learning they were meant to evidence, and what nursing education needs to do structurally in response. The argument moves from the current AI landscape, through the premises of nursing formation, to why discursive responses (policies, declarations) cannot address a structural problem.
A presentation for students participating in an EU-funded Blended Intensive Programme at Thomas More Hogeschool in Belgium. Examines how AI separates the production of artifacts from the learning they were meant to evidence, what problem-based learning already does differently, how AI changes group work and inquiry, and three practical shifts students can make in how they use AI within PBL.
An internal staff development session for the CPC team introducing AI through Microsoft Copilot. Covers what AI is and isn't, safe working practices, structured prompting with the RGID heuristic, and hands-on practice — with the goal of each participant leaving with one specific task to try that week.
Professional education curricula face a fundamental infrastructure problem: while comprehensively documented, they lack systematic queryability. This presentation introduces a three-layer architecture using graph databases as the source of truth for curriculum structure, supported by vector databases for content retrieval and the Model Context Protocol for stakeholder interfaces.
The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy's annual Founders' Lecture, arguing that the question facing the profession is not what AI can do that humans cannot, but how practitioners shape the context in which human-AI collaboration happens. The talk opens with the disorienting evidence that AI now matches or exceeds clinicians on diagnosis, empathy, and ethical reasoning, then rejects the defensive 'sanctuary strategies' this provokes. Its central idea is context sovereignty: because language models are stateless, static, and contextless, the professional context a practitioner brings is not a comfort but a structural necessity — and controlling it is the distinctive human contribution. It closes with the coming shift to patient context sovereignty and the work of meaning-making in an ambiguous moment.
An invited presentation at the Lincolnshire LMC Getting It Done Conference exploring how generative AI functions as a virtual business consultant — supporting practice management, strategic planning, and operational efficiency for healthcare practices. The talk covers six use cases: developing online presence, targeting patient groups, enhancing patient experience, strategic service development, ethical implementation, and change management.
A presentation for the ADAPT International Conference 2023 on expertise and AI in professional education. Argues that generative AI is an unstoppable force — democratising access to professional knowledge and acting as a low-cost, personalised "expert mentor" — meeting the immovable object of universities and their traditional role as gatekeepers of expertise. Asks what formal professional education is for in a world where expertise is abundantly available, and argues for raising expectations through project-based learning and authentic assessment.
A presentation for the 2023 ENPHE Conference on coming to terms with AI in professional education. Argues that the dominant discourse traps us in a false choice between AI as saviour and AI as threat, when what the moment actually demands is a tolerance for ambiguity. Borrowing the antihero archetype, it reframes AI as neither hero nor villain but an ambiguous partner in new human–machine coalitions, and proposes that wise adoption is not a destination but the start of an iterative, cooperative process.