Education and strategy: aligning the focus to increase particpant engagement

Rohit D'Costa^1,2, Kelly Rogerson²

¹ICU, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Australia, ²DonateLife Victoria, Carlton, Australia

The Victorian DonateLife Network (DLV network) employs 23 medical specialists and over 50 nursing specialists and donor co-ordinators. Professional development meetings have been held regularly since network formation focusing on audit of missed potential donation opportunities within hospitals. In 2012 an education working group with representation from across the DLV network was formed with the intention of developing, implementing and evaluating education strategies to ensure alignment with DonateLife national strategic priorities[1].

The group decided to adapt and re-format the network meetings.  Themes were planned for each meeting with reference to the national priorities, e.g. “eye and tissue donation”, “marginal and high risk donors” or “culturally and linguistically diverse potential donors”. Dynamic methods of delivering material were used such as moderated “hypothetical” case discussions with participation from transplant sector panellists, presentations from Victorian researchers involved in cutting-edge transplantation research and case presentations from network staff.. It was strongly felt that presentation of cases for audit should remain a core feature of each session.

 A web-based survey of staff response was undertaken 6 months post implementation of the changes with 10 questions posed (a combination of Likert scored and nominal data).With 61% (38/62) of eligible staff responding (we excluded education working group members), we found strong support for the thematic format of the meetings (87% positive response)) and the structure of the meetings in terms of interactive vs didactic presentation (71% positive response). Discussion of cases in the audit at these meetings was felt to be beneficial by 79% of respondents, underlining the importance of maintaining this component at the core of the meetings. Overall the majority (70%) of respondents felt  that the meetings “meet [their] educational needs” and it is planned that the working group will continue to evaluate and adapt the programme to ensure this.