Abstract:

To provide medical and allied health professionals students with the best clinical learning environments, quality processes must be in place, and these require innovation to assure audit material resources that are fit for purpose, can work well within the situation and provide the correct teaching and learning to train auditors.

HEALINT4ALL ERASMUS+ Strategic partnership provides medical education and allied health professionals with an audit system to facilitate quality assurance of EU clinical learning environments by mapping and innovatively adapting a newly established audit protocol and support tools to suit the Higher Education needs for wider application to medicine and professionals allied to medicine. The project conducted a literature scoping review followed by interviews and focus groups across all 6 European partners of clinicians, students and educators of service needs and best practice, resulting to map standards and requirements for clinical learning environments and develop a protocol to assess the quality of placements. Next, it developed a digital interactive platform for European and national placements appraisal following user-centred design to allow the collaboration between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), and HEIs and placements. In order the application of the HEALINT4ALL protocol within the digital interactive tool to be beneficial, the auditors of the healthcare placements should have the necessary competences to perform the audits utilising the HEALINT4ALL a digital interactive platform. An online or blended learning approach is preferred to fit with the clinical academics’ needs that will undertake the role of auditor.

Thus, HEALINT4ALL co-created a Virtual Interactive Teaching Package for Training the Auditors of Healthcare Placements. It followed a modified ASPIRE framework to develop the package. The ASPIRE framework stands for Aims, Storyboarding, Population, Implementation, Release and Evaluation. This work describes the co-creation journey that engaged stakeholders in 6 different countries in order to co-design the resources, experts in the field that reviewed the content to ensure its high quality, the development that followed and the first pilot’s evaluation from experts.

While some efforts have been made towards the standardisation of auditing clinical placements, to the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to develop a short curriculum to training the auditors of healthcare placements and implemented as a virtual interactive teaching package.

Acknowledgements:
This work is supported by the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education “Assuring Quality Health Care Traineeships for Medical and Professionals Allied to Medicine through embedding and exploiting tools across Higher Education (HEALINT4ALL)” (www.healint.eu) (2020-1-UK01-KA203-079155) project of the European Union.

Keywords:

Participatory design, ASPIRE, Train the trainers, elective placements, Quality assurance, nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, education.