On the 27th September some members of the
LondonHCSTN board were given the opportunity to host our own workshop at the
annual Healthcare Science Education event delivered by NECL healthcare
scientists. The whole day was a fantastic event full of inspirational speakers
and enthusiasm for healthcare science education.
The afternoon was formed of concurrent workshops including
our own workshop which focused around portfolio based learning!
The workshop was aimed at discussing the challenges of
portfolio based learning and working together to come up with means to address
the challenges. We were fortunate to have a range of attendees including
portfolio-based trainees, training officers and training assessors who were all
able to give different perspectives on understanding and addressing the
challenges.
Five main challenges were posed to the attendees to discuss
and feed back on, we have listed these below with some helpful suggestions from
participants.
Placement
competencies – who signs them off and what to do if they are unreachable
- Organise delivery of training with responsible
individuals prior to training commencement, it is then clear who is responsible
for what, and workload can be anticipated ahead of time
- Take advantage of OneFile’s ability to remind
people on your behalf!
Competences that are
outside the scope of your specialism’s practice, or where no training has been
given
- Feed back to the NSHCS that specific competences
outside the scope of practice should be instead treated as experiential
learning
- Have a verbal conversation with a reviewer which
is then submitted as video evidence
- ‘Take the spirit’ of the competence and apply it
to something within the scope of practice
Different
expectations of detail and competence
- Use existing laboratory policies for competence
in practice and apply these to training
- Set up a training committee within the Trust to
standardise and improve training
- Share accepted competencies between trainees and
trainers to establish what should be expected
Getting acceptable
work signed off quickly
- Incentivise trainers by emphasising the benefit
of training for CPD
- Keep competencies concise to reduce workload for
trainers and trainees
Knowing who will
train and assess the competency and the time frame for this
- Establish good communication between the host
department and rotational departments
- Establish a contingency plan for if a member of
staff leaves unexpectedly during training
We would like to say a big thank you to all those who
attended the workshop and provided such good feedback to help us all to tackle
these challenges going forward.
The London HCSTN 