Breakfast Education Sessions - a novel approach to learning

Abstract

Introduction

The need for continuing professional development is well recognized and is supported by professional bodies in all healthcare disciplines. It can be difficult to access CPD for those who work shift.

Aims

To create a multidisciplinary learning environment within a National Ambulance Service (NAS) station. To describe the participants responses to the education sessions by the participants of the sessions: on whether they thought they were helpful, they learned anything and if they thought it contributed towards team building.

Methods

The National Transport Medicine Programme (NTMP) has recently become a service within the National Ambulance Service (NAS), under the new name of the NAS Critical Care & Retrieval Services (NASCCRS). This service is responsible for transporting critically ill neonates, children & adults with a multidisciplinary team. The Breakfast education sessions were planned a number of months in advance with the purpose of creating a multidisciplinary learning environment. The sessions lasted for no more than 1 hour from 730am-830am once a month. The sessions often focused on topics that the teams encountered during their clinical work. The sessions were also started to further enhance and build the multidisciplinary team combining of the NAS staff and the NASCCRS medical teams. The participants were sent a questionnaire to assess their attitudes towards the sessions.

Results

The majority of the participants (78%) were very satisfied with the sessions, they thought they were educational, useful and inclusive. All of the participants believed it was a very well or extremely well way of building a multidisciplinary team, and 67% will use these sessions for their CPD. All free text comments were positive and encouraged more of these type of sessions.

Conclusions

The breakfast education sessions created by the team at the National Ambulance Service Critical Care & Retrieval Services are a novel idea to learn, build teams and more importantly eat breakfast! We plan to extend the sessions with a view to streaming them in the future.