So here we are and Christmas is almost upon us and that means it’s nearly 2019 and that is scary!! The last 12 months have been a bit of whirlwind for me to be honest and amongst that whirlwind, was the creation of EDeducate.
I remember the exact moment when the penny dropped. I was in town at the German Market in January, with my parents and my friend Jo (one of the best ED nurses I’ve ever worked with, Jo was the ED nurse you meet as new to ED and think- yep you are made for ED- and the kind of nurse you invest in…. find those people in your team and invest- trust me it pays off.
I was trying to plan my masters project for the third year of my masters which consisted of 2x 5000 word assignments on a service improvement idea, it had to be something you were passionate about and Jo and I were both saying this had to be education related.
I was known for my 4am teaching sessions in the resus room but how could this be achieved? I now worked in a new ED, the ED where I had worked was a DGH, I was an ED sister and loved it but was really looking for the opportunity to put my advanced practice training to use and get a trainee ACP role.
Cue a move to the midlands and to be honest 18 months of hard work- worthwhile but hard nevertheless and not the kind of place where you could arrive and suggest a 4am teaching session for sure. So, I decided I needed to create something that could be accessible and deliver the same passion as a 4am teaching session, but to anyone who wanted it and WHEN they wanted it.
From that moment, it took about three months to convince others that this was a thing… and then it was very much thanks my amazing friend Liz (@sisterscrappy) for helping me to shape it into what we could achieve.
Just a quick brief on the assignments and then we will get down to the top 10.
So, I chose to do the assignments specifically on ED nurse education, going down the route of what are we doing and is it enough? A large part of this was how do we get nurses to realise that self-education needs to form a large part of their development but for that to be true, there must be places for them to go to get this education and a way of recording this- step up EDeducate and the RCN Framework – See Blog no 1 here.
The first 5000 words was really a look at the literature out there, of which there isn’t a lot and this involved a lot of inference using anecdotal experience. I submitted this and honestly thought I am not even sure this is what they want… It essentially said;
· I don’t think we take ED nurse education serious enough in relation to retention and recruitment and even patient safety
· I don’t think we have a structured approach to how we achieve a national competence level of a Level 1 or Level 2 ED nurse
This lead to a questionnaire which would gather data from several ED nurses in three departments enquiring how they felt about their education and what ideas they had or simply what they wanted.
The results were predictable, but nevertheless hard to swallow- the nurses felt undereducated, unsupported and regularly thought about leaving the specialty. They felt like the education they received was on the most part mandatory and not speciality driven.
The second 5000 presented those results and admitted that in terms of keeping this service improvement project ‘small but beautiful’ as advised by my tutor on day 1- it had failed. It had instead opened a can of worms which needed waaaay more work and investigation.
So the results are back 7th Jan…. wish me luck!!
Ok- So back to the top 10 things from 2018 on the ED nurse Education front;
10- Education fellow posts
We first heard of this being presented by the EM3 team at the EMEC conference and they are now very popular, the future we feel is that equivalent nursing posts will follow- the RCN frameworks' advice on roles and banding of nurse educators below and we should be aiming for a nurse educator who is present on the shop floor, completing supervision and competencies and not booking nurses on mandatory training- the RCN recommends this role is a Band 7 minimum #controversial
9-#betweenthelines blogs
I chatted a bit about the awesome blogs written by Holly on the ED ITU interface, this started with Holly and I having one of our usual ITU vs ED wind up’s and I threw it back and said ok teach us… teach the ED nurses how to properly ‘ITU’ a patient ready for ITU, we have only just scratched the surface with this but I love them and they are proving quite popular- check out blogs here.
8-The NTACC trauma nursing course
Liz chatted about this new and innovative trauma nursing course which is designed to meet level 2 of the TEQUINS. More on the course here, and more on TQUINS here.
7-Mark Radford- Director of Nursing (Improvement) @NHSImprovement
Mark is taking retention of nurses seriously- we think it has close links with education and LOVE (big up @Lizcrowe2 check out her LOVE presentation here- trust me you are going to want to watch this). Seriously though it’s so great to have the leads in nursing fighting for what is truly going to improve and shape the future of nursing.
6-Instagram as a learning platform- Who knew?
Liz talked about how we are getting on with our Instagram page and where we hope it will take us, I confessed I am not sure how to really make Instagram work for us, we talked about Vicky’s amazing skill video’s and how popular they have been so watch this space for some more.
5- The EDeducate reach (Sorry there is not a better word for this)
I chatted about being excited that EDeducate was being embraced by not only nurses in ED but also consultants and the whole #TeamED, we want the content to be relevant to the whole team but also maybe just to inspire everyone working in ED to put nurse education on the agenda.
4-RCEM Learning
We have given the RCEM Learning Instagram and their daily cases a whole section on their own as we just love this. We think the cases are relevant to everyone, even if all it does is make you think "how would I nurse that patient in ED" it takes a couple of minutes from your day and its quite fun!
3-EMTA Conference- Beyond the Breach
Liz and I chatted about the conference where we were invited to talk about the stuff EDeducate is doing and also the ACP role. So this is amazing for ED nurse education because believe us when we say there are lots of amazing ED docs around the country who want to do nurse education and the very fact we were invited means the wider #TeamED is education focussed!!
2- #FOANed
Liz chatted about the various #FOANed resources now popping up, so a lot of the existing education websites are starting to focus some of the education towards ED nurses. We talked about expanding the stuff we are doing and hopefully inspiring other #FOAMed sites to think about ED nursing education as part of their stuff.
1-EDeducate
So we are certainly not trying to blow our own trumpets but we are just so happy with what we have been able to achieve with the website, this started as an idea and we couldn’t have expected to be where we are in 9 months and we have barely scratched the surface.
I have recently moved to a new department @UHP_NHS and as previously mentioned I have submitted my final masters’ assignment so I am hoping to commit more time to EDeducate in 2019.
Stay tuned, stay in ED, stay focussed, have a look at the links in this blog and tell us what to do next. Most of all though THANK YOU!!!!
Ash