Training General Practice Registrars on conducting child health and developmental surveillance. Evaluation of a blended eLearning Program

Introduction: Community-based integrated care initiatives for children and families had been developed in Sydney Australia over five years.  One of those is the Healthy Homses and Neighbourhoods Integrated Care (HHAN) Initiative. The HHAN design includes several sector workforce capacity building initiatives.  A partnership was formed with: primary health networks (PHN), child and family nurses, practice nurses, a general practice training organisation, Sydney Children's Hospita Network and the local health district.

Child health checks are conducted by Child and Family Nurses in Australia. Due to many reasons, most families do not return for their checks. However they still frequent their GPs for a range of health needs, a setting where follow up checks can be implemented and an opportunity for postgraduate learning.

Theory/Methods: GP registrars were invited to participate in an eLearning program followed by a clinical skills workshop. A curriculum blueprint mapping to learning objectives underpinned the program. Content was extracted from well child check resources and developed into individual learning objects, multimedia and interactive quizzes within a blended learning platform.

Results: Eighty-eight percent  felt that the online program was useful, 66% felt learning objectives were fully met with 100% at least partially met. An overwhelming majority felt that the workshop reinforced knowledge gained from online modules and improved confidence in applying learnt content. More results will be presented at the conference.

Discussion: Development of eLearning for general practice is a growing field. GPs are busy and often bombarded with many requirements for CPD. Ensuring that there are adequate incentives as well as instructional design that is interesting, relevant and time efficient is the mainstay of GP education.

Conclusion: Learning to conduct child health checks can occur in an online setting. Blended learning opportunities should be provided where possible to consolidate specific clinical skills. There is potential for learning to occur in more remote geographical regions and for busy clinicians.

Lessons learned: Designing an eLearning program for GPs need to take into consideration their work practices, IT setup and convenience in order to achieve program completion. Embedding eLearning within a CPD context provides incentives and endorsement of education standards.

Limitation:

The evaluation numbers were constrained by web site technical matters.

Suggestions for future research

Further e-Learning modules are planned as part of the district integrated care initiative.  Qualitative research projects are planned to assess impact.