Continual Staff education

[normas]

I would like to ask how other home care agencies keep their staff up to date with various techniques and procedures and how you assure agency mandatory in-services? I have been reviewing some online resources for training new staff or a new technique and updating education and wonder if anyone has used this method. Even to refresh staff on practice standards and techniques they have done many times.

[Vicky Agramonte]

In home care, getting our staff in the office for mandatory inservices challenges us all, even if these inservices are beneficial for professional growth and development. A few things that we have done over the last two years that has helped a bit: 1) we promote peer evaluation and education as they are well received by the clinical staff, and their inservices are well attended, 2) we are also using online learning situations for training, such as the OASIS training, this allows the clinician to sit for the inservice on their free time (free time, what a concept!!), 3) I also run power point presentations continuously outside my office, which attracts the clinicians attention and allows them the flexibility they need, and 4) scheduling the inservice during routine team meetings that the clinicians are likely to attend. Hope this helps; I'd love to hear other suggestions as well...

[Laura Brannigan]

We also use the OASIS web training for orientation and refreshers. Our mandatory inservices are done in powerpoint and we have clinicians and office staff access the training folders through their laptops. There are tests they must complete and submit to be credited with attending the mandatory. This eliminates down time for our clinicians and office staff. We also provide a half day inservice quarterly with topics selected by staff or supporting our best practices.

[normas]

Thanks for replying Vicky and Laura, I am instituting some of your ideas. I find the web OASIS training too slow for our experienced clinicians even for a refresher. We will use it on new staff though. Do you use any other on-line learning medium for training and if so what site? We are working on the power point but unfortunately do not have laptops yet and therefore the "old fashioned" paper system is almost done - which will make the power point easier! Great ideas and thanks! I do like the time cut out for in-services and wonder what you think about the half of a day - are the clinicians able to concentrate on the half day in-service when they have a half a day with patients to see? I am trying to put the education into things we already do so it is not perceived as a burden or "just another" time consuming event. Thanks again and would love to hear others ideas on continual staff education. :)