Transplant Education Month: A bitesize daily teaching programme for the multidisciplinary team
Grainne Walsh1, Nick Ware1, Louise Kipping1, Joanna C. Clothier1, Elizabeth Moore1, Kate Mythen1, Helen E. Jones1.
1Paediatric Nephrology, Evelina London Children's Hospital, London, United Kingdom
Introduction: Delivering a regular in-house teaching programme in a busy tertiary paediatric nephro-urology transplant service poses various challenges including ensuring regular attendance, timing within a shift pattern of working, staff turnover (especially trainee medical and nursing staff) and ensuring colleagues are free to deliver teaching whilst simultaneously covering a clinical service. To add to this the COVID-19 pandemic limited the ability to deliver face-to-face teaching on the clinical unit.
We developed a novel way of delivering teaching through short bulletins to cover topics in relation to paediatric renal transplantation on a daily basis over a one month period.
Methods: In May 2021 7 members of the nephrology team delivered short daily bulletins by email to the whole paediatric nephro-urology team including qualified doctors and trainees, nurses and nursing students, pharmacists and Allied Health Professionals in the department.
Results: The table illustrates the topics covered in the months educational email bulletins. This was successfully sent out every day including over the weekend enabling members of the team (>70 recipients) to access these when most convenient. A copy was printed and placed in prominent places on the acute unit e.g. in the staff room to enable those without regular email access to read these.
An example of the bulletin from Day 10 is shown in the figure below.
Conclusion: Finding time to deliver teaching on a busy tertiary inpatient floor can be challenging and was less of a priority during the early stages of the pandemic when the situation was evolving and many staff were redeployed to cover adult services.
Delivering email bulletins to provide education over the course of a month enabled some flexibility and increased accessibility to the teaching.
Informal feedback was positive both during and following the transplant education month. We plan to repeat the programme, developing formal feedback to assess its impact and adapt it for network and community colleagues who support our transplant programme.
