Educational Response to Covid-19

In this time of uncertainty, ANZAHPE aims to facilitate the sharing of information and also health professional educational practice in response to covid-19.   We have developed a COVID tab on the front page of the ANZAHPE web-site, accessible here.

This site includes useful information and also a discussion forum.  There are currently two forums:

Sharing of practice and resources

Specifically, we want to know how you are adapting to the impact of social distancing and reduced capacity by health workers in respect to Health Professional Education – the education of nursing, physiotherapist, medical, dietetic students etc.   On this page, you are welcome to share a brief description of the problem/challenges you have faced, the strategies/solutions you are trying in order to remediate the issue, and the impact it is having.  There is also the option of up-loading material that might be shared. Two or three key words would also be useful so we can theme and curate the problems/issues and strategies/solutions and any associated material and post these back on to the web site under a designated repository.

General Chat

Use this forum to raise issue, concerns, or observations about the COVID situation in your context.  

While anyone can access the page, you will need to be logged in with your ANZAHPE membership details to join the discussion and post replies.

We hope you will find this a useful resource.

Joy Rudland

Professional Development Representative

Dear Colleagues,

These are extraordinary times. Unprecedented global events are unfolding around us. Every aspect of our lives is being impacted by public health policies that we would never have considered even remotely likely in our society. The health and education sectors are bearing the brunt of both the evolving pandemic and the containment measures. As health professional educators we feel the pain from all angles.

As I write this message, I struggle with the need to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, and the need to play whatever small role that I can, to try and find some positivity within this grim reality. I may not succeed in achieving this balance, but I assure you that I write this with the best of intentions.

The grim reality is that we face a health crisis of an unimaginable magnitude. On a global scale, we collectively face morbidity and mortality that our generation has never experienced. Health systems will be tested to their limits and beyond. Health professionals will be stretched to breaking point, and we hope that the commitment that brought us into these professions will suffice to see us through the difficult times ahead. I salute those of you who are already on the front lines and expect that many of us will be playing our part as the workforce requirements increase over the next few weeks.

The impact on the higher education sector is on a scale that is still difficult to grasp. The impact on students and staff has been significant. It has been amazing to see the resilience and resolve of our colleagues as they adapt to this new environment. I have personally experienced this and am in awe of the capacity of colleagues to step up and venture into unknown territory with amazing courage and boldness. The strength of our student body has been heartening, and once again, I have personally experienced the amazing outcomes that we can achieve when we work in partnership with the student body.

Can we find a silver lining around these dark clouds? Is this the catalyst that might drive a wave of change that was so desperately needed in healthcare and education? Is this the time to re-visit our deeply held beliefs and practices in health professional education? We have seen how the crisis has changed models that would usually take years of negotiation, with the rapid expansion of remote consulting being a key example. This may be the time for us to reconsider all that we did in the name of health professional education and ask ourselves whether some radical change may be needed. Can we look at redundancies of content and skills within our programs, and replace these with the skills that the next generation of health professionals will need? Could we look at resource intensive practices that use up precious global resources, including our daily commutes to work, and ask whether there are better ways to achieve our aims? Academic conferences would be another area that deserves close attention. We see many conferences around the world cancelling or converting to virtual formats. With great sadness we have also decided that a face-to-face format will not be possible for ANZAHPE 2020. But we remain open to other options. We are presently exploring options to utilise the resources developed for the conference to deliver a program of professional development that will be meaningful to our members. I would welcome suggestions from you on innovative options that we might use.

I will end by drawing your attention to the discussion forum that is now available on our revamped ANZAHPE website. We would love to hear about innovative educational approaches that you may have adopted in response to this evolving crisis. We are all grappling with similar problems across institutions and it would be wonderful to engage in some practice-sharing. The discussion forum also encourages open discussion of topics of relevance to health professional education. Please feel free to use these fora to share your thoughts and stay connected as a caring community during these uncertain times.

Wishing each and every one of you the very best.

Chinthaka Balasooriya
President, ANZAHPE

Bulletin Issue 1, 2020

We are excited to welcome you to the first edition of our new web-based Bulletin. The news items of the Bulletin are now integrated into the ANZAHPE Website.

You can read the news in any order by selecting any of the Read More or Find Out More buttons in the Bulletin.

 You can also read the news items by visiting ANZAHPE Website and going to the ANZAHPE News page at any time. You will find the ANZAPHE News page under the Bulletin tab on the home page of our website.

Please give us feedback about your experience of the new Bulletin, we are keen to communicate with you clearly and in creative ways. 

Megan Anakin
Editor, ANZAHPE Bulletin

Dear Colleagues,

In light of the evolving COVID 19 pandemic, we would like to inform you that the ANZAHPE 2020 conference, 2020 Vision for Learning Cultures, will no longer proceed in its original face-to-face format.

While July is several months away, the ANZAHPE Committee of Management and the Local Organising Committee are aware of the forecasts from the WHO about the potential spread of the disease. We are also mindful of the unprecedented restrictions on travel and gatherings of groups, which are clearly necessary to limit further spread. With this in mind, we wish to convey a clear decision at an early stage to give certainty to all stakeholders. 

The conference registration portal will be closed. For those who have already registered, information about refunds will be available shortly. We remain committed to serving our members and are exploring options to disseminate health professions education research and enhance the professional development of our members. Further updates will be issued in the coming weeks.

Irrespective of the above decision regarding the conference, we wish to inform authors of abstract acceptance decisions to acknowledge the hard work of people who submitted and reviewed abstracts. Information about abstract decisions has been communicated to presenting authors. 

We appreciate your understanding and would like to thank all who have engaged with and supported us around ANZAHPE 2020. We wish you the very best.

Chinthaka Balasooriya, President, ANZAHPE

Elizabeth Molloy, Chair, Local Organising Committee, ANZAHPE 2020

Did you know that the ANZAHPE can support you to connect with colleagues? The ANZAHPE online Member Directory lists all our members and is searchable. For this feature to function effectively, we need all members to update their profile. 

Updating your profile: 

• Go to the ANZAHPE homepage and click on the 'person icon' for member login (on the right top corner)

• This will take you to a Log In page which asks for your email and password. If you don’t remember your password or have never logged into the ANZAHPE website before, just click on the Forgot password button (and use your institutional email or other email you have signed up to ANZAHPE with to retrieve a temporary password)
• Once you have sorted out your password and have logged in, you will need to click on the ‘person icon’ again and View Profile.
• Then you can use the Edit Profile function (at the top of the page) to edit/update your details. The key fields are: Institution, Position, Profession, Biography, and Scholarly interests. You can also add a photo if you wish. Please note that only members who are logged into the ANZAHPE website can view these extended details (these are not publicly available).
  
• Make sure you Save your changes. 

Searching the Member Directory:

• You don’t need to be logged in to view and search the member directory and view basic details e.g. member name, institution, and scholarly interests.
• You need to be logged into the ANZAHPE website to view details such as Position, Profession, and Biography.
• Use the Advanced Search function to search for members within a specific profession, sector, state, or country.

Koshila Kumar
Membership Secretary, ANZAHPE

Progress reports on projects that received ANZAHPE Research Grants in 2019.

Developing resilience and positive mental health strategies in health professional students
Project Lead: Ben Milbourn

“Talk to Me” – Improving mental health and suicide prevention for young adults

A scoping review of the literature on suicide prevention programs has been carried out and submitted for peer review. The “Talk to Me” mass open online course (MOOC) has been developed as an online suicide prevention intervention created to address the growing mental health needs of university students. The program contains 6 modules covering positive mental health strategies, suicide and self-harm awareness, crisis communication skills, and current interventions. Key skills include suicide crisis planning and response strategies, as well as ways to improve your own or others’ mental health. Funds from the grant were used to develop video resources using actors to create a narrative of a person experiencing mental health distress. Lived experience educators consulted on the scripts of the scenarios. A pilot of two of the modules was carried out late November 2019. A consumer reference group and non-government organisations working in community mental health have consulted on the MOOC content, providing valuable feedback.  The project will now move to the next phase and commence roll out the MOOC using randomised control group methodology for approximately 250 health university students in March 2020. 

Enhancing feedback literacy in the workplace: a learner-centred approach
Project lead: Christy Noble

Junior doctors in emergency departments (ED) have reported dissatisfaction with feedback in this setting (Chaou et al., 2017; Yarris et al., 2009). Medical educators and supervisors often conceptualise feedback as information transmission (i.e. from the supervisor to the learner). With this prevailing view of feedback, it is not surprising that junior doctors’ active role in feedback can be overlooked when developing professional capabilities. Moreover, working in busy fast-paced environments, such as emergency departments, can make it challenging for supervisors to balance patient care with feedback (Chaou et al., 2017). Heightening junior doctors’ skills in feedback, as seekers, processors, and users of performance information may support their learning experiences, transitions between terms, and ongoing capacity to learn through work.

This ongoing design-based research study aims to explore how junior doctors engage with feedback processes, after participating in a feedback literacy program during their emergency medicine term at Gold Coast Health. We have conducted five feedback literacy sessions with 80 interns.  Each iteration has been evaluated through focus groups interviews (n=5) with the interns (n=30) and through educator reflections.  Based on these data, the sessions were refined to enhance intern feedback literacy.  

Our thematic analysis is ongoing, however based on our initial analysis, interns suggested that the literacy sessions contributed to their understanding of effective feedback practices in ED. They described using a range of new strategies such as priming the supervisors for feedback, and sharing their evaluative judgments to facilitate their engagement in feedback conversations. They noted that these strategies may be transferable to other terms and felt more confident to seek feedback. We have found it is important for interns to have structured tools, such as  written feedback, to prompt feedback conversations, yet it is the conservation that has most impact on their learning. The interns also described ongoing challenges when engaging in feedback in ED including lacking time to follow up, and  feeling exhausted and non-receptive to feedback. Overall, our analysis suggests that a key feature of being feedback literate is being able to read cues about performance from the environment and interpret these in a meaningful way.  For further research, there would be value in conducting observational studies to understand the interplay between context and feedback literacy.

References

Chaou, C.-H., Monrouxe, L. V., Chang, L.-C., Yu, S.-R., Ng, C.-J., Lee, C.-H., & Chang, Y.-C. (2017). Challenges of feedback provision in the workplace: A qualitative study of emergency medicine residents and teachers. Medical Teacher, 39(11), 1145-1153. doi:10.1080/0142159X.2017.1366016

An innovative gender-focused education intervention for health professional students: A pilot study 
Project  Lead: Frances Doran

Sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination based on gender occurs across a range of health care settings with frequent complaints made to Health Professional Registration Boards of Australia and the Australian Health Practitioner Agency.   Undergraduate health professional education provides an ideal opportunity to not only initiate a change in attitudes about gendered violence but also equip graduates on how to deal with it, prevent it, and become safe and ethical clinical practitioners. This is an area that is often overlooked in undergraduate curriculum.

To meet this gap in education, ANZAHPE funded an innovative gender-focused education intervention which incorporated a bystander component, delivered to students enrolled in the Master of Osteopathic Medicine students at Southern Cross University. The goal was to enhance knowledge and awareness of the gendered drivers of violence and facilitate attitudinal and behavioral change.

Progress to date

• Ethics approval gained 
  
• Gender-focused primary prevention educational intervention, developed in consultation with an expert in gender-based violence
  
• Workshops delivered to two groups of students enrolled in the Master of Osteopathic Medicine at Southern Cross University
  
• Students completed pre- and post-education surveys
  
• Statistical data analysis complete (preliminary analysis indicates statistically significant changes in some attitudes and knowledge)
  
• Follow-up interviews/surveys to be completed 
  
• Final report and publication to the ANZAHPE journal in preparation

The results are applicable to a broad range of people interested in gender-inclusive health professional education

Analysis of Leadership activities and strategies in Interprofessional Learning using a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) approach 
Project Lead: Helena Ward

This research study focuses on leadership activities and strategies in interprofessional learning (IPL) using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to analyse the links between the actions that leaders take to promote learning, their everyday activities and their longer-term strategies.   

The outcomes of this study will add to the body of knowledge on IPL and inform design, implementation, and evaluation of IPL programs.

The research questions are:

• How are leaders building capacity in IPL?
• How can these findings be applied to other IPL contexts?

Using a Leading for Learning Reflection tool, participants were asked to record examples of their actions that were aimed at fostering interprofessional learning in everyday activities and how these actions related to their overall goals for IPL.  Participants were interviewed to explore how they are build capacity in interprofessional learning and their views on leadership and learning.

In 2019, we conducted a pilot study with the reflection tool and follow up interviews. This led to some changes in the reflection tool and data collection process.  Through a separate IPL balanced scorecard project last year, we have identified academic staff within the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences who have a leadership role in IPL.  We are currently focusing on participant recruitment during the first half of 2020, to be followed by interviews.

Development of an Evidence-Based Practice Learning and Assessment Framework for academics, workplace learning supervisors, and students: An action research project  
Project Lead:  Kylie Murphy

Since receiving an Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators (ANZAHPE) research grant in July 2019, the research team has developed resources informed by feedback from academics, placement-experienced students, and placement supervisors from a range of health disciplines.

The initial draft framework was informed by a review of relevant literature and the combined expertise of the research team in relation to Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) education. Preliminary feedback from placement supervisors suggests that a summarising poster, a more detailed booklet, and checklists, available to download from a website, would best meet supervisor needs. Since then, feedback from the stakeholder groups—received through focus groups, interviews, and email exchanges—has informed the refinement of these resources. 

The formative evaluation, involving iterative cycles of feedback, reflection, and further refinement, is now complete. The team is currently finalising the resources for publication and summative evaluation. The resources will be made freely available on a website that will include a link to a brief evaluation survey.  This website will be launched in April 2020. 

LIME Connection VIII

The eighth biennial Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education Network (LIME) Connection was hosted by the University of Otago and held in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), Aotearoa (New Zealand) from 5–8 November 2019. The theme was ‘Pouhine Poutama: Embedding Indigenous Health Education’.

The conference built on evidence and strengths-based presentations from previous LIME Connection conferences, and highlighted initiatives relating to indigenous health teaching and learning, curriculum development and research, community engagement, and the recruitment and graduation of Indigenous students and trainees in the health professions.

Conference report available here – https://bit.ly/2UUXU8O

Conference highlights video available here - https://bit.ly/2SV6BNx

Did you know?

The Australasian Interprofessional Practice and Education Network (AIPPEN) has existed for well over a decade. A group of co-founders wrote an article about AIPPEN’s shared vision for collaborative interprofessional practice in 2007, published in Focus on Health Professional Education (Vol.8, Issue 3) which can be found at: https://www.anzahpe.org/AIPPEN

With the revitalisation of AIPPEN at the 2019 ANZAHPE conference in Canberra, comes the opportunity to build stronger interprofessional collaborative connections. Formed at the ANZAHPE conference last year, the AIPPEN Steering Committee aims to: 

•     create a community of practice around interprofessionalism;
•     establish a repository for the sharing of resources;
  
•     lead interprofessional activities within ANZAHPE; and
  
•     link with Interprofessional Global (https://interprofessional.global/).
  

Connecting

If you were on the 2019 AIPPEN mailing list, you will receive an email regarding your interest in staying involved.

If you want to contribute to this burgeoning network and keep informed, email aippen@anzahpe.org, or A/Prof Fiona Kent, Chair of the AIPPEN Steering Committee, at: fiona.kent@monash.edu

Calling rural educators and practitioners.

If you are a rural-based health professional educator or practitioner with a passion for interprofessional collaboration, and you wish to reach out to others similarly inclined, A/Prof Tony Smith at: tony.smith@newcastle.edu.au

Koshila is a Senior Lecturer in the Prideaux Centre and Course Coordinator of the postgraduate programs in Clinical Education at Flinders University. 

Her main scholarly interests are around faculty development and career pathways in health professions education, and curriculum and pedagogy. Koshila has a specific interest in using theory to explore how health and social care professionals make the transition to education and develop their educational expertise and identity. Koshila is the current Membership Secretary of ANZAHPE. She applied for ANZAHPE Fellowship to support the capacity building of people and teams in health professions education and to further consolidate her connection to this valued professional network.

Dr Charlotte Denniston is a Lecturer of Medical Education in the Department of Medical Education, Melbourne Medical School. 

Charlotte holds a Bachelor Physiotherapy (Hons) Degree (2008) and PhD in health professions education (2018) from Monash University. 

Charlotte’s PhD and subsequent research and scholarship has focused on aspects of professional practice such as healthcare communication and professionalism as well as learning in the workplace. 

Through her teaching and learning work at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and her previous role as Education Advisor at the College of Intensive Care Medicine, Charlotte has been involved in the professional development of clinical supervisors across the continuum of health professions education (HPE). Charlotte also has an interest in exploring the patient’s voice in HPE.

Charlotte applied for AFANZAHPE to engage with the supportive mentorship culture provided by the Fellowship scheme, and to build a stronger connection with members of the HPE community across Australia and New Zealand.