Is Online Education For Healthcare Staff Worth Investing?

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Clemence Norris
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1 Is It Worth Investing in OnlineContinuous Medical Education For Healthcare Staff? M. Cristina MAZZOLENI Chiara MAUGERI Carla ROGNONI Alessio CANTONI Marcello IMBRIANI

2 Introduction The quality of care is highly affected by the level of competencies of the healthcare personnel. Continuous Medical Education (CME) is mandatory in Italy In healthcare institutions the role of education in the acquisition and maintenance of institutional quality certification is not marginal. Large scale institutions support educational activities for their personnel, in order to assure the updating of knowledge, pursue uniform distribution of competences, train new personnel

3 Large scale institutions, and in particular research and care delivery institutions (IRCCS) with high level internal skills, traditionally organize themselves educational events FSM 12 medical centres spread all over Italy people represent healthcare staff: physicians (P), nurses (N), technicians (T), therapists (F), biologists, psychologists, and other (O) professions.

4 The organization of and the attendance to class courses during the regular working time is not an easy issue. The availability of teachers, tutors or course organizers is not equally distributed in all the various medical centres, and the offer of courses is variable site by site. Education is not always efficiently provided within the institution to the personnel, and to nurses in particular.

5 Online education can offer advantages to healthcare personnel, including easy use without time and space constraints. Webbased CME is growing worldwide, Recently distance learning has been recognized at Italian ministerial level as a possible mean for education and training also for CME. Elearning is as effective as traditional education [1] In addition to traditional courses, FSM has started an online educational program. [1] Davis J, Chryssafidou E, Zamora J, Davies D, Khan K, Coomarasamy A. Computer-based teaching is as good as face to face lecture-based teaching of evidence based medicine: a randomised controlled trial. BMC Med Educ, 7:23, 2007

6 Aim To evaluate the feasibility of relying on e-learning for at least part of the updating and training of the FSM healthcare staff. This presentation reports the results of the delivery of e-learning courses to FSM personnel during a span of time of 7 months in order to assess : the attitude to online courses attendance the proportion between delivered online education and delivered traditional education the economical sustainability of the online education delivery process

7 Elearning course offer Title Addressees # credits Duration (Hours) Neurological bladder (NB) P Nursing of Neurological bladder (NNB) N 6 4 Obese patient handling (OPH) N, T, F 6 4 The patient with respiratory patologies (RP) Introduction and practice of clinical trials (CT) N 6 4 P, N, T, F, O 12 8 The CME e-learning system is based on Moodle e-learning platform ( The platform is publicly available on the web ( and accessible also from the intranet serving the FSM medical centres.

8 Methods the attitude to online courses attendance Starting from the analysis of the Postgres database connected with the platform, a set of ad hoc queries has been developed, in order to retrieve users s profession, work site, course completion.

9 Economical sustainability of the online education delivery process Work Hour Saving online education can take place any time during the day, can be interrupted and restarted users often attend online sessions during night shifts or spare time slots and very often from home It has been assumed that, reasonably, 50% of the total hours of online educational activity does not affect working hours. traditional class education entails the physical absence of the student from the work place online education with tutor provides 1.5 credits per hour, while class education provides 1 credit per hour WHS = (online course duration) *1.5 (online course duration)* 0.5

10 Results Distribution of enrolments to online courses for each healthcare profession

11 Educational offer & attendance: Online and class courses provided by FSM. Online > traditional online > 50% traditional

12 Healthcare personnel work hour saving Costs to run the system (elearning platform, hosting, connectivity, maintenance) for one year, + costs for implementing five e-learning courses are less than one third of the theoretical income

13 Conclusions Is it worth investing in online education for healthcare staff? YES!

14 Conclusions Online education is not appropriate for all the educational needs and it is not a magic solution for all the problems BUT it can be an effective economically convenient help. The comparison between the results achieved by online education and traditional education points out that elearning is not at all a niche tool used (or usable) by a limited number of people Physicians seems to be to be the least respondent. Only a small percentage (17%) of them has attended online courses. This result is in line with the literature These results do not represent an arrival point, on the contrary they should act as driver to enhance the quality and specialization of online education.

15 Thanks for the attention!

FOR FACULTY USE ONLY RSPT 2266-2267-2166 COMPLETION OF CLINICAL OBJECTIVES SUPERVISOR ROTATION. Student Name TIME

FOR FACULTY USE ONLY RSPT 2266-2267-2166 COMPLETION OF CLINICAL OBJECTIVES SUPERVISOR ROTATION. Student Name TIME COMPLETION OF CLINICAL OBJECTIVES SUPERVISOR ROTATION Student Name TIME Date Time In Signature In Time Out Signature Out Hours I certify that the hours listed on this sheet are correct. Student Date FOR