Abstract:

In the Netherlands, the aim for increased quality and efficiency of care has implications for patients, health- and home care professionals as well as for healthcare organizations. In this paper we focus on the reconfiguration of health and home care professionals’ daily practices in which, on the one hand, cooperation within professional networks is increasingly required. On the other hand, health and home care professionals are obliged to move about in clients’ private networks as a means to provide patients with self-management support.

We set up a training program to further this increased emphasis on health- and home care professionals’ skills in acting within networks, for which we have used three design parameters.

First, we chose to stay close to actual situations and individual experiences, since care professionals with initial education on the medior or higher occupational education level neither have a learning preference for abstractions nor for complex texts.
Second, we excluded normative feedback and stimulated reflectivity as a means to improve individual approaches rather than prescribing ‘best ways’ to act within networks.

Last, we strived for efficiency. Since health- and home care professionals have tight schedules and little time to spare, the completion of the program should be quick.

Design strategy:
Within these design parameters, we chose to generate input for blended learning through action learning. An action learning program with 15 professionals of 5 different health- and home care organizations was initiated to stay close to actual situations and experiences. Throughout the action learning program we asked them to share individual experiences, to reflect on those actual situations, and to be explicit on what they thought would be proper and proactive ways of acting in networks. In the second phase we linked their input to theoretical concepts. To ensure the use of theory which appealed to the professionals, we asked them to reflect on some of the concepts, to point out those which could be used in the blended learning program, and to argue why.
Furthermore, we asked them for feedback on the content and lay-out of the online learning tool and we trained them as coaches for the offline sessions in the blended learning program.

Contribution and outcome:
We describe a novel approach to blended learning to establish healthcare networks using action learning. In this process we developed the educational content of the blended learning program, while we also trained health- and home care professionals to lead the offline sessions.
The design of the blended learning program is based on established principles for flipped classrooms and adult education, in which professionals are stimulated to reflect on presented cases from the context of their individual daily practices. The offline workshops deepened those reflections. Professionals pointed out having learned from each others’ experiences.

Future work:
In the actual paper we will evaluate the outcomes of the real life pilot with the blended learning program in January 2016.

Keywords:

Blended learning, action learning, healthcare networks, flipped classroom, train-the-trainer.