Learnings from the forced transition of an industry supported educational programme for young experts in urology and oncology from face-to-face to digital during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

When the COVID-19 pandemic caused face-to-face meetings to be cancelled, an industry-sponsored educational programme, designed to develop skills and expand knowledge of young experts in oncology and urology, was forced to partially move from face-to-face setting to virtual meetings. In our outcomes analysis, we aimed to better understand what drives behavioural change following a series of educational interventions based on the physical or virtual formats. Therefore, we performed a structured outcomes evaluation for each educational intervention, including the perspectives of the learner and the teaching faculty. Our main findings were that “relevance” is the strongest driver of recall, satisfaction and behavioural change. Social interactions amongst learners and between faculty and learners are possible in the digital world, and we observed a trend of the young learners in favour of digital learning, especially with improved technical platforms enabling social interaction. Other findings were that new skills are required by the teaching faculty and that hybrid formats were identified by all participants as the model of the future. When developing future educational programmes, these specific needs of learners and faculty need to be considered and offer opportunities to develop more personalised programmes in order to increase learning impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical education
• lifelong learning
• digital formats
• digitalisation
• relevance of learning
• hybrid meetings

Acknowledgments

This outcomes evaluation was conducted and led by LLH Concepts. We would like to thank our research team for the dedicated support they provided: Tong Li and Trishna Chauhan (Senior Researchers, LLH Concepts). We thank all other members of the working group who are not co-authors but contributed to the discussion of the results.

Disclosure Statement

IW is president and founder of LLH Concepts. She has disclosed that she has worked as a consultant to Janssen on the programme. IV is professor of behavioural science at the University of Warwick and head of research at LLH Concepts. He declares no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests. ET is lead of external scientific relations EMEA at Janssen Cilag Pharma GmbH. She was involved in the design and conduct of the study and preparation and final approval of the manuscript, but she was not involved in the collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data.

Additional information

Funding

The educational program and outcome research was funded by Janssen, The Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.