Professor Angela Davies is Director of Digital Transformation in Healthcare Education (School of Health Sciences) at the University of Manchester and, along with her colleagues, has increasingly been looking at ways to introduce digital technologies into learning, while also closing the gap between digital teaching and digitally enabled practice. One such example is the learning of Electronic Healthcare Record Systems (EHR’s), and the difficulties medical and health students were facing entering placements or practice without sufficient knowledge or exposure to EHR’s, with students reporting either very limited access or no access at all, as well as instances of having to use colleague accounts, increasing the risk of governance and confidentiality breaches.
Kurt Wilson, Professor of Medical Education at The University of Manchester wanted to address this by developing ways for students to increase their interaction with EHR systems in academic settings. As well as using educational licences for simulated practice, Kurt drew on the expertise of a working group to simulate the type of complex and nuanced patient records they would encounter with a real-life patient.
Kurt and Angela recognised both the opportunities for developing this learning experience further, and the limitations of engineering patient records to provide the richness of data students would typically be working with on a real system. They also identified the value in extending EHR learning to other health and care professions including nursing, midwifery, and pharmacy. With faculty approval, Kurt and Angela successfully applied for a medical education grant from Pfizer and established an interdisciplinary working group, enabling them to focus on how they could integrate EHR into a pilot set of scaffold learning programmes, simulating full patient journeys between different student professions (handover from a hospital setting to community as one example), as well as embedding key underlying principles around the patient/professional dynamic, communication, and good quality data capture. Most excitingly, a major ambition for this project is to introduce the use of real patient data. With patients ready and willing to donate their records and even attend live simulated sessions, the project team are now exploring the necessary consent model to take this programme a step further.
Contributor: Professor Angela Davies, Director of Digital Transformation in Healthcare Education, School of Health Sciences, The University of Manchester.