Who trains our doctors? The hidden workers behind medical education
What happens when the academic work that shapes medical training is authored by people who remain entirely invisible to the system?
In this lecture, Patricia Kingori examined a striking phenomenon revealed through her documentary Shadow Scholars: highly educated Kenyan scholars ghost writing medical and healthcare assignments for students worldwide.
These writers possess the expertise to train the next generation of healthcare professionals, yet their intellectual contributions go unacknowledged while students graduate and enter practice without fully developing the competencies these assignments were designed to build. Professor Kingori explored how this case study illuminates broader patterns in global health systems. Her research demonstrates how essential workers, from research fieldworkers to community health workers, enable critical interventions yet remain marginalised within structures of knowledge production and professional recognition.
As part of LSE Health's 30th Anniversary, this lecture addressed fundamental questions about medical education and global health equity: Who holds the authority to validate medical knowledge? What determines whether expertise is recognised as legitimate? And what are the implications when systemic power dynamics render crucial contributions invisible?
These questions matter beyond academia; they shape the quality and equity of healthcare systems worldwide.
Meet our speaker and chair
Patricia Kingori is Professor of Global Health Ethics at Oxford. Her research examines ethics, power and authenticity in health and science, with extensive fieldwork in Africa and South-East Asia. She leads Wellcome projects on fakes and fabrications, global health crises, and invisible labour. Patricia advised SAGE during COVID-19, is a Medical Research Foundation trustee, and was awarded Salesforce Woman of the Year 2025.
Lesong Conteh is a health economist researching diagnostics markets, infectious disease economics and health systems in Africa. She leads a Wellcome Trust programme (2025–2031) on the African diagnostics market, collaborating with partners in Ethiopia, Lesotho and Senegal. Widely cited for multi-country economic evaluations, she was Academic Director of the LSE Hub of the African Health Observatory and is Honorary Professor at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
More about this event
LSE Health (@LSEHealthPolicy) aims to expand and improve conceptual frameworks, apply new methodologies, encourage debate, and introduce new themes that will contribute to policy discussions related to health around the world.
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