Abstract:

The Covid 19 pandemic presented many challenges for healthcare educators, particularly those new to supervising/mentoring healthcare students on clinical placements. The dilemma was that healthcare organisations urgently required students to assist in the immediate assessment and management of severely ill patients, but many registered healthcare practitioners felt ill-equipped to facilitate this student learning. This also needs to be considered against a longstanding recruitment & retention crisis in the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Health Service with record numbers of vacant healthcare posts (1). Consequently, it was unfeasible to release healthcare practitioners during this time to undertake educator training off-site because they were needed to deliver immediate patient care within the practice setting. Recognising this challenge, the School of Health Sciences (SHS) at the University of Liverpool, working with colleagues from the Centre for Educational Development & Support (CEDS), sought to develop resources for an interactive, online-accredited, two-day multi-disciplinary introductory practice educator training (The Liverpool Educator Programme). This programme can be taken flexibly over an extended time period, so that educators can manage this training alongside their work roles. Funding was successfully gained from Health Education England for £26,000 to develop a suite of interactive multimedia learning tools. The ambition was to produce suitably trained healthcare staff to facilitate student learning and then assess learners in clinical practice. Educators are to be evaluated by learners following their clinical placements using the standardised PARE evaluation system (2) and placement quality through feedback from the UK’s National Student Survey (3) implemented across all UK higher education institutions.

The project consisted of eight educator modules developed by clinical practitioners, including six subject-based and two education-based modules. Utilising a social constructivist approach to capture course participants prior learning and experiences, the resources were developed into interactive eLearning modules using Articulate Storyline. The interactivity within this resource includes quizzes and drag-and-drop exercises, which have been designed to develop and support knowledge and reinforce learning (4). Participants are assessed by completing a test to demonstrate the achievement of the learning outcomes.. The modules have been developed and assessed against the 2018 accessibility standards (5), to ensure compliance with the UK government standard and WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to obtain AAA conformance standards (6). *References available on request*

Keywords:

Covid 19, practice-based learning.