Ms Daphne Nurse1, Ms Jacinta Simpson1
1Eastern Health, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Daphne Nurse is an Allied Health Clinical Educator at Eastern Health, where she supports the development and implementation of workplace education for allied health professionals. Her work is focused on developing clinician capability in clinical supervision, education, and supporting interprofessional learning in the workplace. As an experienced senior speech pathologist, Daphne also appreciates the significance of clinician-led workplace education and is passionate about collaboratively enhancing clinician education capability for optimal healthcare outcomes.
Abstract:
Purpose:
To present the pilot and evaluation of 'Allied Health Education Consults', an innovative and resource-efficient service aiming to enhance clinician education capabilities and support high-quality local workplace education.
The issue under consideration:
Delivering education to staff, students and clients is a core component of allied health practice, yet clinicians anecdotally report a lack of formal training in education design principles. Limited time, resourcing and competing priorities challenge accessible upskilling in this area. New interprofessional educator roles have enabled the development of an education consultation service to address this need in a metropolitan hospital setting.
The nature and scope of the topic:
Allied health clinicians with planned education initiatives (pilot n=13) engaged in individualized education consults, grounded in experiential learning, coaching, and adult learning principles. The service provided on-the-job upskilling in a range of education design and delivery principles, applied to improve the clinician’s education initiative, whilst concurrently enhancing their knowledge for future training. Planning, implementation and evaluation followed quality improvement methodology.
Outcome and conclusion:
Pilot analysis demonstrated strong engagement across allied health professions, with 100% participant satisfaction. Evaluation indicated positive behaviour change, learning needs met, and new knowledge gained for future initiatives. Collaborative upskilling was highly valued, and return on investment extended beyond consult participants as all consults focused on group education initiatives. The pilot highlighted the effectiveness of this scalable, sustainable, grassroots approach in empowering clinicians' educational capabilities whilst supporting robust workforce education for high quality patient care.